[theforum] internationalisation

adrinux adrinux at gmail.com
Mon Dec 8 06:41:52 CST 2008


2008/12/8 Martin Burns <martin at easyweb.co.uk>:
> Doable, I think, although I did remember seeing somewhere (Adrinux/
> Genghis: help me!) that Drupal5+ collated all CSS into a single output
> delivered to the browser, which may make life interesting if we can't
> interrupt that collation process to swap between files.

Yes, it can optionally collate and compress (strips out all comments
and whitespace) all the stylesheets - each module in D5+ has it's own
stylesheet, throw in a few in your theme and you can easily end up
with 20 odd css files needing to be downloaded - so this is generally
considered a good thing.

And yes it can be controlled. IIRC it's all css files are in an array
and you can play with which ones are included BUT, you'd be better IMO
using sub-themes.
The sub theme, theme variant - call them what you will - has been
greatly improved for D6, but worked at least as far back as 4.7, maybe
even 4.5. Basically you'd have one main theme and have sub themes for
each language, all reliant on the main theme. There's also the
possibility of using the multisite setup and having separate language
sub sites, rather than trying to do it all in one.

I think the technical side of it isn't really the big problem, it's
the people side of it. Finding admins for one, editors for two and
from what Weiwu says[1] it seems different countries may even prefer
different content, standards and accessibility may be taken for
granted in the west, but not elsewhere, for instance.

I think the first thing is deciding what you want to do with content,
what we do on the backed really flows from that and I don't think
there are any insurmountable problems.

[1] "Chinese web develops and web designers because they are now
getting in touch with XHTML, CSS and Web 2.0 (a few years later then
in the west)"

-- 
Adrian Simmons | http://perlucida.com



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