Sent by Paul Novitski on 7 March 2007 00:12
>>>>From: Paul Novitski [EMAIL-REMOVED]>
>>>>Every bilingual page on the site contains both languages, with
>>>>only one of them displayed at a time.
>>>>
>>>>In the absence of javascript, the Japanese/English toggle
>>>>requests the current page from the server with the requested
>>>>language selected (by specifying it in the body class).
>>>>
>>>>With javascript enabled, the language toggle simply switches the
>>>>body class and the displayed language changes immediately.
>>At 3/5/2007 06:28 PM, Chris Chen wrote:
>>>Could you elaborate a bit on what you mean by "switch body class"
>>>with a simple example?
>Paul Novitski wrote:
>>Here's one example of this technique. Plug the requested language
>>into the body class:
>> <body class="langEN">
>>or
>> <body class="langES">
At 3/6/2007 01:08 PM, Erik Visser wrote:
>so for every language you have a seperate html file?
No. I suppose that's a possible approach, but I never work like
that. Most of the time I keep variable content in an SQL database
and merge it with a template (providing the additional advantage of
making it easy for a non-technical client to modify the text without
mucking with the layout and styling). In any event I wouldn't
maintain two marked up pages with different language text unless
there were some overriding reason -- such as two languages being so
different that they require different markup -- although, again, I'd
still be inclined to keep the text in the database and merge it with
two separate templates.
If a round-trip to the server is used to switch language, each
downloaded page instance can contain just one language.
If you want to be able to switch language instantly, you have to
download all texts in a single page and toggle between them
dynamically. This would obviously get sluggish with long texts or a
large number of languages. Although it's fun to be able to switch
languages instantly, most multilingual sites don't require such
immediate response time. Once a visitor selects their preferred
language they tend to stay there. Downloading multiple texts when
only one is needed seems needlessly inefficient. It might make a lot
of sense in a language training website, for example, when the
visitor can switch back and forth rapidly to check their own
translation of a text with the one offered.
Regards,
Paul
__________________________
Paul Novitski
Juniper Webcraft Ltd.
http://juniperwebcraft.com
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