Re: New FAQ: Global Gateway

On Wed, 12 Nov 2003, John Yunker wrote:

> I'd like to submit the following as an FAQ on global gateways. It is quite
> long (perhaps too long) and needs a bit of work yet - please send me your
> comments.

Thanks for your excellent FAQ. Below are a couple of comments.

> Companies may also register domain names in non-Latin scripts (sometimes
> referred to as internationalized domain names). For example, a company in
> Korea, Netpia (www.netpia.com) offers support for Korean-language domain
> names.

  Actually, what Netpia have done is rather hackish. It requires a
plugin that works only with MS IE on Windows and your name server has
to be modified to support it. Besides, it's not domain names per se
but 'keyword' service.

> However, be aware that the DNS currently only supports a subset of
> the ASCII character set; all non-Latin workarounds are just that,
> workarounds. Keep an eye on ICANN (http://icann.org) for developments on
> internationalized domain names.

  I'm afraid this is a bit misleading. It's true that only a subset of
ASCII chars can be used, but that has already been worked around with
a specially-devised encoding scheme (to wrap up Unicode characters
in that subset of ASCII) as you probably know.

 A few months ago the KR domain registrar began to accept
_genuine_ internationalized domain registration in Korean for .kr
domain. IDN works NOW with Mozilla and Opera. MS IE and Konqueror/Safari
don't yet support it though. Try 'http://정통부.kr' for instance.
I guess the same is true of other national domains.


> Content Negotiation

> Google (www.google.com) relies on content negotiation. To test it out, using
> Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options > Languages and set a
> different language preference. The language at the top of the list is the
> one you want delivered to you first. Using Netscape Navigator, you select
> Edit > Preferences > Navigator > Languages.

  Could you please mention Mozilla whenever you mention Netscape?
As I wrote earlier in another thread, Netscape is a Netscape-branded
browser based on Mozilla and with the shutdown of Netscape division of
Time-Warner, there is likely to be any new version of Netscape. However,
Mozilla will continue to be developed.

> The downside to content negotiation is that many Web users do not know how
> to re-configure their browsers should they wish to change their language
> preference; this can be frustrating for multilingual Web users or people who
> share a computer.

  It'd be frustrating if you're an American at a net-cafe in one of
non-English speaking countries and you don't know how to set up your
language preference.

  Would it be a good idea to include a link to the Apache reference
document on language setting of documents served and document on other
web servers?  In the default Apache installation, it's very easy to
offer multiple versions of _static_ documents. Just use language codes
as suffices (e.g. index.ja.html or index.html.ja for Japanese). Apache
will pick up and serve index.fr.html   if the language preference of a
client is French.

> BY THE WAY

> Translate the links
> Don’t forget to translate the names of the languages in the gateway. For
> example, don’t use “German” when you can use “Deutsch.”  Always use the
> native language of your user.

  BTW to BTW, :-)  to Korean localizeers, please use '한국어' (Han-guk-o)
instead of '한글'(Hangul). The former is the name of the language and
the latter is the name of the script. You wouldn't use 'Cyrillic alphabet'
for Russian, would you?

  Jungshik

Received on Wednesday, 12 November 2003 22:04:02 UTC