RE: Multilingual Web Site Architecture

Kim,

See below for answers.

Regards, Russ 

I18N Engineer, AT&T

-----Original Message-----
From: ckim@ecal.com [mailto:ckim@ecal.com]
Sent: Friday, November 05, 1999 10:59 AM
To: Rolfe, Russell D, ALSVC
Subject: RE: Multilingual Web Site Architecture


Russ,

We are trying to publishing multi-lingual web page, however, we like to know
more about the Asian Fonts displays on the web browser. 

In HTML, do we have to define font or language attribute?  If then where?

<<<Answer>>> There is always a long and short answer
	to every question.  To answer this more fully, I
	would need to know what browsers and versions
	you are development for, etc.  

	Needs to say, in the <Head> portion of each
	HTML page you should put the following

	<META HTTP-EQUIV="content-Type"
        CONTENT="text/html; charset=xxxxxx">

	Where xxxxxx represents the encoding you HTML
      page is in.  Some encoding are:

	      US-English and Western European languages
			 charset=ISO-8859-1

		Japanese (Shift-JIS)
			charset=x-sjis

		Traditional Chinese (Big 5)
			charset=big5

		Multilingual (UTF-8)
			charset=utf-8

	A good way to find what name to use for specific
	encodings is to go to Microsoft's home page, then
	go to one of its language pages, view the source
	and see what attribute they used for charset.

Most of our files are ASP which contains VBScript and Oracle 8 Query
strings.

Please let me know which way is the most efficient way to publish
multi-lingual web. Your quick response will be greatly appreciated.

<<<ANSWER>>> This is no short answer for this.  Books 	and books have been
written.  What you need to 
	do is:

	1. Decide who your audience is
	2. decide what your content should be
	3. Decide where you are going
	4. Decide how much is static and how much
		is updated frequently
	5. Decide if the cost of keeping the 
		frequently update content translate
		justifies the translation
	6. Put in a work process to stream line
		the content updates
	7. Then decide how to design you web site
		for multilingual use.

You might want to read "How to build a successful international Web Site" by
Mark Bishop and "CJKV Information Processing" by Ken Lund.

Good luck

Regards, Russ Rolfe

I18N Engineer, AT&T
	

Thanks! 

Christian Kim
Program Analyst
e-mail: ckim@ecal.com
http://www.ecal.com
eCal Corporation
234 North Columbus Blvd
Philadelphia, PA 19106 
TEL: 215-574-4900, Ex.322
Fax: 215-574-4999

-----Original Message-----
From: www-international-request@w3.org
[mailto:www-international-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Rolfe, Russell D,
ALSVC
Sent: Friday, November 05, 1999 10:38 AM
To: 'Suzanne Topping'; www; i18n; Unicode List; nelocsig
Subject: RE: Multilingual Web Site Architecture


Suzanne,

You might want to talk to Alis Technologies (www.alis.com)  They have a
multilingual site that uses the Language feature of the Apache server.

You might want to look at the Apache server documentation to get some other
information.

Hope this help.

Regards, Russ Rolfe
I18N Engineer, AT&T

-----Original Message-----
From: Suzanne Topping [mailto:stopping@rochester.rr.com]
Sent: Friday, November 05, 1999 10:26 AM
To: www; i18n; Unicode List; nelocsig
Subject: Multilingual Web Site Architecture


I received the following question, based on comments that I sent
to a machine translation email list regarding web site localization research
I am conducting.

Does anyone know if any work has been done in this area? Are there
repositories of templates or models?

Thank you.

>What I am working on now is to define an ARCHITECTURE for multilingual
>web sites. These sites will be designed for different purposes:
>informational, e-commerce, information retrieval and extraction, etc.
>Do you have please any information about multilingual web sites
>architectures ? Generic models, examples, articles, companies
>proposing such architectures, etc.


--++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Suzanne Topping
Localization Unlimited
(Globalization Process Improvement Consulting and Training)
28 Ericsson Street
Rochester, New York, 14610-1705
USA
Phone: 716-473-0791
Fax: 716-231-2013
Email: stopping@rochester.rr.com

(Send me an email to join the North East Localization Special Interest
Group, an email distribution list which acts as a discussion forum for
localization issues.)

Received on Friday, 5 November 1999 12:28:50 UTC