OT: directing to new page dependent on browser/keyboard language?

Question

Hell
I have just got a new gig building a dual language site.
English and Spanish
and I have heard that its easy enough to have a mechanism
that detects the
users language and serves hello.htm or ola.htm respectively
for instance.
How would I go about that?
Cheers
James Loudon
www.fatgraphics.com
websites::photography::video

Answer 1

.oO(James Loudon)
>Cool, thanks David. I had found various Javascript
methods of doing this but
>was looking for something more solid and server side. I
find myself wanting
>to avoid Javascript as much as possible these days.
Good. At least you shouldn't rely on JS for a site's most
basic
functionality, it should always work without it. But if done
properly,
JS can really help to further improve a site's usability.
Back to the topic ... currently I don't have a multilingual
project
online, but I played around with it a while ago and would do
it like
this:
(1)
Server-side content negotiation (as already mentioned), but
only on the
homepage. The document root would contain at least these
files for 3
languages:
/index.php.de
/index.php.en
/index.php.es
And maybe a generic
/index.php.php
(There are reasons for that, it's explained in the Apache CN
manual.)
These files just redirect the browser to the
language-specific homepage,
which directly leads to issue 2:
(2)
There are two ways where to store all those pages and how to
access them
by URLs:
* subdirectories, e.g.
http://example.com/de/foo
http://example.com/en/foo
http://example.com/es/foo
* subdomains, e.g.
http://de.example.com/foo
http://en.example.com/foo
http://es.example.com/foo
It's more or less just a design decision, but there are some
reasons for
and against each other. The subdomain-way for example is
quite common
and used by projects like Wikipedia, but can become a problem
if you
want to use SSL/TLS.
Whatever way you go - make sure that all pages are linked to
their
language counterparts, so that the user can always and
permanently
switch to another language. It's also very helpful to not
only have
multilingual pages, but translated URLs as well:
http://de.example.com/produkte/musik/cds
http://en.example.com/products/music/cds
Micha