there's lots of things u can do to ensure that the language is correctly
identified and the right characterset it used
1. as sajan suggests, the setting locale is important. it also helps with
time/date formats
e.g. for php: setlocale(constant,location)
(see also: http://www.w3schools.com/php/func_string_setlocale.asp)
2. define the page's _primary_ language of the page content in the header
html xmlns=http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml; xml:lang=en lang=en
3. define the language inline when it changes from one language to another
within the content
SPAN id=msg1 class=info lang=fr
4. use the uft-8 characterset and define it in the header through the doctype
?xml version=1.0 encoding=UTF-8?
!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC -//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd;
html xmlns=http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml; xml:lang=en lang=en
5. use css to define the font to use for different languages.
p lang=zh class=zh(some Chinese text)/p
/* in the css */
[lang=zh],
* html .zh {
font: 800 14pt/16.5pt Li Sung, serif
}
viola!
M :)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Sajan Franco [EMAIL
PROTECTED]
Sent: Saturday, 14 June 2008 6:42 PM
To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org
Subject: Re: [WSG] Multiple Language Domains
Hi Paul,
one way is to ask the user to choose a Locale on the landing page such en_EN or
en_US , where en is the language chosen by the user and EN would represent the
country.
For instance in countries like Belgium and Switzerland, most of the websites
ask the user to choose their locale before proceeding so that the website can
serve content of their choice in the language they prefer.
An example of this is http://www.nissan.ch/ or http://www.sunsilk.com where the
user can chose the locale and proceed further. Since the translations are in
different directories it is search engine friendly too. So when a user choose a
locale he is taken to the respective homepage which serves the user in the
language of his preference.
But as far as usability is concerned I am not sure because both of cited
examples feature flash, which I suppose is not that user friendly when you take
accessibility into consideration.
Warm Regards
Sajan Franco
On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 12:39 AM, Paul McCann [EMAIL PROTECTED]mailto:[EMAIL
PROTECTED] wrote:
Hi Guys,
I am currently in the middle of building a site which has to be bi-lingual. We
have two domains for the site www.ourwales.org.ukhttp://www.ourwales.org.uk
and www.cymruni.org.ukhttp://www.cymruni.org.uk
I am looking for suggestions/help on how to handle the two domains.
Currently ourwales is the prominant/main domain and the one to which the IP
details of the site are set. We are then using an alias within apache to also
point cymruni to the same site. So you see the same site when you visit, but
have two different domains. Both these domains are advertised.
I have a few worries though, currently both domains point to the english
language version of the site, this will be changed so cymruni goes to the Welsh
language side. Although the language is the same and its possible for people to
flip between the two languages is it possible that google will see the site as
duplicate content?
Also we are having trouble getting the alias to append the lang=cy to it on
first visit. My thought was to make the ourwales domain the prominant one, and
set up a folder with a 301 redirect in it which says
cymruni.orghttp://cymruni.org has moved permanantly to
ourwales.org.uk/lang=cyhttp://ourwales.org.uk/lang=cy that way we have only
one domain indexed.
The reason for writing to this group is two fold
1, how does this affect usability and what is 'best practice' in this situation?
2, How have/would you implement a problem like this?
Ideally we want to provide the smoothest and friendliest experience to both the
user and SE whichever domain they use.
thanks
Paul
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