Re: Accept-Language and W3C-Translations

* Stefan Mintert wrote:
>Now my question: Why is 'Accept-Language' not considered when serving
>W3C specs?

Because the normative document is not available in any different
language than U.S. American English.

>But, wouldn't it be possible to consider 'Accept-Language' *and*
>preserve the special status of the normative document? My idea is to
>evaluate 'Accept-Language' on the server side and to give the reader the
>option to get the translation. When accessing a W3C spec there could be
>a small pop-up window (uuh, i don't like pop-ups ;-) reading "This
>document is available in *your* language" (of course this sentence
>should be in the preferred language). Or instead of the pop-up I'd like
>to have a short note in the W3C spec, somewhere at the top, i.e. near
>the abstract; the note should contain a link to the other language
>version ("Would you like to read <a href="...">German</a>?").

You are free to publish an annotated version of the original document
that incorporates such a note but it is not possible to include it in
the specification itself, since you need to update the specification
each time translation status changes.

Less convenient but more practical is to encourage editors to give
translations a more prominent position inside the specification, e.g.
in the header like

  This Version:
     http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/... (also available in PDF, ...)
  Latest Version:
     http://www.w3.org/TR/...
  Previous Version:
     http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/...
  Known Errors in this Document:
     http://www.w3.org/...
  Available Translations:
     http://www.w3.org/...

An alternate solution could be to establish a specification proxy that
redirects to the best available version, consider something like

  http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Translation/REC-xml-20001006

This would of course only work, if people link that URI instead of the
original specification and that's rather unlikely most of the time.

This is btw. offtopic here, I suggest to reply to either the spec-prod
or the w3c-translators mailing list.

Received on Wednesday, 9 October 2002 14:56:07 UTC