Re: Changing language on the Debian site is too cumbersome
24 dec 2016 kl. 14:41 skrev Leo R. Lundgren <leo@finalresort.org>:
> 24 dec 2016 kl. 05:31 skrev Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org>:
>
>> On Fri, Dec 23, 2016 at 10:15 AM, Leo R. Lundgren wrote:
>>
>>> When visiting the www.debian.org site, if you want to change the language of the contents, you are currently expected to do so using the web browser's settings. I think this is very cumbersome and bad UX.
>>
>> I'm not able to find any addons to fix the bad browser UX.
>>
>> If you can think of a technical solution that would work with our
>> current setup, that would be great. Our current setup is static HTML
>> with no JavaScript distributed to multiple machines running the Apache
>> web server, currently configured like this:
>>
>> https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/mirror/dsa-puppet.git/tree/modules/roles/templates/apache-www.debian.org.erb
>
> Sure, that's rather straight forward - use server-side processing (not static HTML) to make it such that when a user has clicked a link to get a certain language, the server knows about that and can then add the language code to all the links it renders from there on (those that go to the site itself, of course). This is how most sites who support multiple languages work AFAIK. Sure, having just static HTML is great and genuine in many ways, but at the cost of functionality.
Come to think of it, it's probably possible to have those static HTML pages generate links which include language in the URL as they are.
If you click on e.g. the link to install Debian via network, you arrive at https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst . You then click the english language link, the page reloads to https://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst.en.html . In this page there's for example a link to "For details, please see: Network install from a minimal CD", pointing to https://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/ . Instead of it pointing to that URL, it could point to the corresponding URL for the current language, which is https://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/index.en.html .
Each static page that is for a specific language could have the links in it contain the language code, so that when a link is clicked, the visitor is taken to the corresponding language-specific page instead of the general one. Or would this not work?
Remember, these links (in the language-specific HTML pages) would only be used if the user at some point clicked a specific language - if they didn't, they will still be surfing around on the general HTML pages which does not have a specific language in their name, and in these documents the links would still be general and not tied to a specific language.
>>> the Debian site is just messier to read in my native language than it is to read it in English
>>
>> You might want to help out with translations to fix that.
>>
>> https://www.debian.org/international/
>
> The problem is that taking a big pile of words and concepts that are inherently english, and turning them into different native languages, often makes for a pretty strained native interpretation/text. I can't speak for others, but on technical topics I find it much easier to read about the things in the language which is most common to the stuff I'm reading about. Many many words when translated become almost to the point of silly, even one can find a corresponding meaning to them in the native language. So this isn't a matter of the quality of the text being bad, I don't think it is, but a matter of it IMO being rather pointless. But it's just my personal experience, and the reason I started this conversation in the first place.
>
>> --
>> bye,
>> pabs
>>
>> https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
>
> Cheers!
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