Re: Multilingual Web Site Architecture

Sorry, I haven't read this list for a while...

From: Rolfe, Russell D, ALSVC <rrolfe@att.com> wrote:


>Sounds interesting.  Could you give an example of what you mean by symbolic
>links?  Also, could you give a brief description of what takes place during
>the "batch" process.


As others have already explained, a symbolic link is a reference to another
file somewhere in the file system. Both Windows and MacOS have similar
mechanisms called "shortcuts".

The batch process mentioned works this way:  Assume that the main site in
some directory has these files stored:

    index.html.en
    index.html.fr
    index.html.no
    image1.gif

Now I basically simulate what files would be served by Apache, given that a
browser had a certain language priority list. Assume this list looks like
this: 'da, en, no, fr' then my Danish site would get symbolic links like
these:

    index.html ---> /path_to_files_on_main_site/index.html.en
    image1.gif ---> /path_to_files_on_main_site/image1.gif

The described system works very well, except for the fact that the site is
quite big, and rebuilding all links takes a long time - and the links have
to be rebuilt when something is changed on the main site.

To overcome the above problems, we have created en incremental version of
the batch process, so that only the changed links get updated.

Recently we have applied some Apache and Perl tricks to the above, but this
deserves a separate post... :-)

Cheers,
Anders
--
Anders Bandholm, UNI-C, Aarhus
  E-mail: Anders.Bandholm@uni-c.dk
  Phone:  (+45) 8937-6645   Fax: (+45) 8937-6677    ICQ: 20617502
  PGP: id=0x42691C89; fp=D7DF EF78 0C55 9E9B  C9EA 3D07 6500 A1BB

Received on Monday, 6 December 1999 06:47:13 UTC