Re: [geolang-comment] One or two files for English and French?

[Murray Altheim <m.altheim@open.ac.uk>]

Steve Pepper wrote:

> At 09:33 23/08/02 +0900, Mary Nishikawa wrote:
> 
>> From a maintenance point of view, it also might be better to keep the 
>> French and English in separate files as they have done. Later on, 
>> adding other languages would only be a matter of adding on more files.


This could be quite a maintenance nightmare though. One versus hundreds
(or even thousands) of files? Yuck.


> I understand why you suggest this, but I think it poses a new problem: 
> The identifier for a particular country can only resolve to a single 
> resource (or location within a resource). So what does
> 
>  http://psi.oasis-open.org/geolang/en/iso3166/#jp
> 
> resolve to? The anchor "jp" in index.html at that location, obviously. 


Not obviously. The resource in question might also be considered as the
DOM element that the 'jp' ID is on, which in this context would make sense.
You'd then avoid the following issues:


> But is index.html the English file or the French file? From the 
> inclusion of "en" in the path it seems that you think it should resolve 
> to the English version...and that you envisage a French version at the 
> location
> 
>  http://psi.oasis-open.org/geolang/fr/iso3166/#jp
> 
> ...which means we end up with two PSIs, not one.
> 
> I think English and French have to be in the same file, thus:
> 
>  http://psi.oasis-open.org/geolang/iso3166/#jp

                                              ^^^
Despite the trend to leave off the document name, relying on the
web server for resolution seems poor practice for something like
PSIs. One can easily alter the server defaults so that the root
of a directory is not 'index.html', such as 'index.asp' or whatever,
and my guess is that this will continue to evolve. I would highly
recommend that we recommend against relying on the server, and use
an explicit filename:

   http://psi.oasis-open.org/geolang/iso3166/index.html#jp

or better:

   http://psi.oasis-open.org/geolang/iso3166/country.xtm#jp

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                  <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK

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