Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 07/08/06 12:37

dingbat@codesmiths.com <dingbat@codesmiths.com> scripsit:

> Apache mod_whatsitcalled will do this very easily for you, based on
> language settings in the browser.

It would, if browsers helped users to select language settings properly. At
present and in the foreseeable future, language negotiation cannot be relied
on.

In a situation like this, the pages should first be written in one of the
languages (the one the site creator knows better), then translated into the
other, retaining most of the markup as such. Then link the different
versions to each other, and you're almost done. Language negotiation might
be set up as an extra comfort, but in practice, many people who know Greek
better than English still use a browser that has language preferences set to
to English - so they would get a suboptimal version. More info on language
negotiation and why it so often fails:

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/multi/

> Simplest and most straightforward though (on a 5 page site) is
> probably to just have a directory structure like this and do it all
> "in longhand"
>
> \index.html
> |
> +- english_pages
> +- greek_pages
> +- shared_images_and_css

That's a good idea, partly because the English and Greek pages probably have
different character encodings, and this is most conveniently implemented
using per-directory settings in .htaccess files on Apache.

It is particularly important to keep the markup clean and simple, delegating
presentational issues to CSS. That way, it is easier to use mostly the same
markup for both versions.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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