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A Short Remark about Language Versioning
Math-Net Pages of an institution can be offered in several languages see e.g. the Math-Net Pages of the
University of Cologne in English and
German. The Web enables automatic
processing of Web pages in different language versions. This general treatment should be used by Math-Net too.
The base for the language handling in the Web are standardized language-specific
shortcuts, e.g.,
- en for English,
en-gb for English (Great Britain),
- en-us for English (US),
- en-ca for English (Canada),
- en-au for English (Australia),
- ..., or
- fr for French (France),
- fr-be for French (Belgium),
- fr-ca for French (Canada),
- ..., or
- de for German,
- de-au for German (Austria),
- ...
The definition of these shortcuts is described in the RFC 3066.
The first part consists of the
two-alpabetic ISO 639 code for languages with an optional extension given by a hyphen and the
two-alphabetic
ISO 3166 code for countries. The Web server has to be configured corresponding to the suffixes in use.
E.G., if you run an apache server, you can insert in
your httpd.conf e.g.
- AddLanguage en .en
- AddLanguage it .it
- AddLanguage de .de
- AddLanguage fr .fr
Now this server is able to manage documents in several languages. In our example, the server can you display
one of the pages <file>.en.html, <file>.it.html, <file>.de.html or
<file>.fr.html, automatically following
the user browsers configuration (see below).
Moreover, a default language can be defined for the server (or for a directory on the server).
For more details, please have a look at the decriptions of the
content negotiation and
module mod_mime
(which explains how to choose different character sets for different languages
etc.) or the corresponding parts of your server docs.
Please do the necessary configurations at your server or ask your webmaster to do so.
Users have to configure their browsers to demand the preferred language.
This is usually done in the preference part of the browser with the
standardized language shortcuts mentioned above.
If you install a new browser then there is usually just one entry
en in the table of languages. Most people do not change this and
therefore get the page index.en.html (or if this doesn't exist index.html) from
the server.
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