[5912] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: WWW and non-English (was ISO charsets; Unicode )
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rick Troth)
Thu Sep 29 02:08:42 1994
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 1994 06:54:57 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: TROTH@UA1VM.UA.EDU
From: Rick Troth <TROTH@UA1VM.UA.EDU>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
>A very important matter here is the choice of language:
>
> (1) in the client
> (2) in the documents
>
>For (1) we must urge the client developers to make their
>program internationalized - preferably through the standardized
>"i18n" methods. ...
I don't know anything about i18n, but I am in favor of
internationalized clients. Several weeks ago I mentioned the use of
message codes instead of message text in certain parts of the HTTP
transaction. If the various response states are represented by
unique numbers, then those unique numbers can be followed by a
known number of optional replacement tokens (this is optional)
and in any case the number can be mapped to local language text.
The idea is that the *client*, not the server,
would provide the HTML to hand to its HTML processor for certain
situations, not only just local results or internal conditions.
Say the server returns a
HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found
(can you translate that to Swedish for me? thanks!)
Your Swedish client would see the 404, throw away the "Not Found",
and supply corresponding Swedish text for the user. CMS Gopher does
this using stock CMS "message repostory" tools. Sadly, though, we
only have one other language besides EN_US. Wanna contribute? ;-)
I don't have anything to add to the discussion about (2).
>---
>Peter Svanberg, NADA, KTH Email: psv@nada.kth.se
>Dept of Num An & CS,
>Royal Inst of Tech Phone: +46 8 790 71 40
>S-100 44 Stockholm, SWEDEN Fax: +46 8 790 09 30
--
Rick Troth, <rmtroth@aol.com>, <troth@ua1vm.ua.edu>, Houston, Texas, USA
