[daisy] Default language considered harmful?

[Marc Portier]

A Rocha Webmaster wrote:
> Hello everyone. I am setting up a group of sites which are very
> international in nature. All of them have more than one language, but
> the primary content language is different in each site. One site has
> most of its pages in Portuguese, another has 5x more pages in English
> than in any other language.
> 
> Should I use the "default" language?
> 

I wouldn't do that for the content that you know will be translated 
eventually.

And even if (you think now) it will never be translated: if your content 
*has* a language then it just makes sense to share that info with Daisy 
(and variants are then the most logical way imho)

Of course, we have to admit that 'default' is a strange value for this 
language field: I know of no population that speaks it :-)

Seriously, I think "default" in this respect has to be read as 
"do-not-care", "not-applicable", "none" or even more pragmatically 
"i-do-not-want-to-use-this-language-variants-feature-for-this-content"

> Would it be better for any future purposes to always create an "en"
> variant for English pages, and so on, and leave the "default" unused? In

1/ yes: I would always make an "en" (or whatever your site's language is)

2/ but also: keep and use "default" since some content really doesn't 
have language variants!

> the future we intend to change the Variants menu to show language names,
> or to show a list of language codes at the top: "ar cs en es fi fr nl
> pt". "Default" will come up strange there.
> 
> I've been checking the live sites list and I am not sure if anyone
> (other that Outerthought's own site about Daisy) is using variants for
> different languages. http://www.veldenduin.be is the most international
> site on that list (4 languages) and yet it looks like the languages have
> been developed separately. It's the same contents in every language, but
> pages aren't connected together.
> 

Not true. The looks are deceiving here.

Admitted: the translated navigation docs introduce translated path-names 
(for SEO purposes), and the language-switcher on top of the page brings 
you to home-pages rather then to the selected variant of the current doc.

But for translation-management purposes the documents really _are_ 
connected as variants of the same document.

check:
http://www.veldenduin.be/nl/logies_overzicht/verhuur.html
http://www.veldenduin.be/nl/logies_overzicht/verhuur.html?language=fr
http://www.veldenduin.be/fr/hebergement/location.html

Additionally, the site uses the 'default' language variant for 
untranslated content like images.

http://www.veldenduin.be/fr/202
http://www.veldenduin.be/fr/202.html?branch=main&language=default
http://www.veldenduin.be/common/202

(Note: introduction of the common 'site' tied to the "default" language 
allows to produce url's that are free from branch-language request 
params, which was in turn a requirement for phase 1 when the 
daisy-editing system was kept in house, and turned into a static 
published site via wget and rsync.)


> Has anyone gone through the trouble of analysing whether it was best (in
> their case) to separate completely the different languages, or it was
> good to use Daisy's language variants? If so, would you like to share
> your premises and results here?
> 

As explained, variants are for sure in heavy use there.

Even if that usage is only visible to logged in authors on the 'edit' 
side of things: Using the variants helped already in finding new added 
documents (in dutch) that had missing variants.

After upgrading to the upcoming 2.2 release the advanced translation 
management features will allow even more control and inspection (e.g. of 
updates on existing docs that are still waiting for translation updates).

See http://cocoondev.org/daisydocs-2_2/537-cd/557-cd.html

Based on the Veld & Duin the conclusion is clearly: "It has been a wise 
decision to use the language variant features of Daisy". Even back then 
on the 1.4 release.


HTH,
regards,

-marc=