You might remember I like static websites and that I’ve been working on a static website framework based on XML and XSLT.
Upon necessity, I’ve added support to that framework for multi-language websites; this is both because people asked for my website to be translated in Italian (since my assistance customers don’t usually know English, not that well at least), and because I’m soon working on the website for a metal group that is to be available in both languages too.
Now, making this work in the framework wasn’t an easy job: as it is now, there is a single actual XML document that the stylesheet, with all its helper templates, gets applied to, it already applied a two-pass translation, so that custom elements (like the ones that I use for the projects’ page of my site – yes I know it gets stuck when loading) are processed properly, and translate into fsws proper elements.
To make this work I then applied a similar method (although now I start to feel like I did it in the wrong order): I create a temporary document filtering all the elements that have no xml:lang attribute or have the proper language in that, once for each language the website is written in. Then, I apply the rest of the processing over this data.
Since all the actual XHTML translation happens in the final pass, this pass become almost transparent to the rest of the processing, and at the same time, pages like the articles index can share the whole list of articles between the two versions, since I just change the section element of the intro instead of creating two separate page descriptions.
Now, I’ll be opening fsws one day once this is all sorted out, described and so on, for now I’m afraid it’s still too much in flux to be useful (I haven’t written a schema of any kind just yet, and I want to do that soon so I can even validate my own websites). For now, though, I can share the code I’m currently using to handle the translation of the site. As usual, I don’t rely on any kind of dynamic web application to serve the content (which the frameworks generate in static form), but rather I rely on Apache’s mod_negotiation and mod_rewrite (which ship with the standard distribution).
This is the actual configuration that vanguard is using to do the serving:
AddLanguage en .en
AddLanguage it .it
DefaultLanguage en
LanguagePriority en it
ForceLanguagePriority Fallback
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(/[a-z]{2})?/$ $1/home [R=permanent]
RewriteCond ${REQUEST_FILENAME} !-F
RewriteRule ^/([a-z]{2})/(.+)$ /$2.$1
(I actually have a few more rules in that configuration file but that’s beside the point now).
Of course this also requires that the MultiView option is also enabled, since that’s what makes Apache pick up the correct file without having map files around. Since the file are all named like home.en.xhtml and home.it.xhtml, requesting the explicit language as suffix allows Apache to just pick up the correct file, without having to mess with extra configuration of files.
Right now there are a few more things that I have to work on, for instance the language selection on the top should really bring you to the other language version of the same page, rather than the homepage. Or it works fine on single-language site just if you never use xml:lang, I should special-case that. For this to work I have to add a little more code to the framework, but it should be feasible in the next weeks. Then there are some extra features I haven’t even started implementing but just planned: an overlay based photo gallery, and some calendar management for ICS and other things like that.
Okay this should be it for the teasing about fsws; I really have to find time to set up a repository for, and release, my antispam rules, but that will have to wait for next week I guess.