Michael Wechner wrote:
Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:
Michael Wechner wrote:
Josias Thoeny wrote:
But personally I don't think it adds much value to have multi-lingual
urls.
Or do you think it does?
yes, I think so. Just think of Switzerland as a country with four
languages and that
people in the french speaking part complain that the german speaking
part wants to rule ....
well, from a political pov that makes sense. but from an engineering pov,
I don't think the engineering pov should rule. I believe this
community agreed to build this stuff for end-users and not for engineers.
well, in this case i disagree. i18n is great, but near the core, away
from the user, i18n gets messy and loses its importance. messy data
structuring hurts the user in the long way (see the examples i gave in
my previous post).
URIs need to be systematic, and i would even prefer to have only *one*
canonical URI for whatever by default, multiple UR*L*s are always
compatibility hacks after the fact (and that's ok). but URIs should
*not* be localized by default.
they are the "book signatures" of the internet. when i go to a library,
the shelves are numbered the same, regardless of the language the book
is in. there is *one* dewey decimal system for catalogues in all
countries. it's abstract, and thus universal.
granted, URIs are nowhere near as good and systematic, and the fact that
they contain letters and words can distract from the fact that they are
in reality very abstract identifiers.
IMHO, URIs are becoming ever less important to the end-user, since
nobody ever types them anymore. so they move from "user-visible" to
"internal" and can be kept generic without loss of usability.
OTOH, having a multi-dimensional uri space makes link management harder
by several orders of magnitude, and it's already non-trivial. i think
the added complexity will hurt users more than abstract, non-localized
urls. (besides, most of the huge international corporations do not do it
either, and nobody seems to care.)
besides, url cleanliness has never been one of lenya's strong points (it
has favoured ease of implementation instead, to the point where system
internals that do not concern visitors at all are exposed via the URLs).
i do think that lenya's urls could use some cleaning up, but only
towards canonicalization, not with l10n in mind. (e.g. i think the area
is not a fundamental part of the resource, but a "view", and should thus
be reflected in a GET parameter, not in the base URL, and so on.)
just my .02 EUR,
jörn
--
"Open source takes the bullshit out of software."
- Charles Ferguson on TechnologyReview.com
--
Jörn Nettingsmeier, EDV-Administrator
Institut für Politikwissenschaft
Universität Duisburg-Essen, Standort Duisburg
Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED], Telefon: 0203/379-2736
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