[thelist] Bilingual Website

Hassan Schroeder hassan.schroeder at gmail.com
Sat Apr 4 00:45:11 CDT 2009


On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 10:11 PM, Peter Abramowicz <pabramow at web.net> wrote:

> What I'm primarily interested in is recommendations on site structure,
> ie. is it a good idea to have an intro page where you choose your
> language or do we just default to one language and let user pick another
> or...

I think best practice is to use the "Accept-Language" header supplied by
most browsers to set the default, with a clear way to select an alternate
(and persist that choice throughout the user session). In the absence of
an accept-language header you could geo-locate by IP, but that's much
less relevant.

And don't forget that the critical term is not 'language' but 'locale', which
also covers things like currency, date and number formats, first day of
the week, and so on.

> I would also appreciate any technical insights for dealing with
> different languages, the environment is Apache on Linux with PHP and MySQL.

If you're storing your text in MySQL, make sure all the defaults are
UTF-8. Hopefully someone else can address specifics of using PHP
in this situation.

HTH,
-- 
Hassan Schroeder ------------------------ hassan.schroeder at gmail.com



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