[tei-council] TEI Guidelines virtual language hosts + some concerns

Kevin Hawkins kevin.s.hawkins at ultraslavonic.info
Wed Apr 21 10:40:31 EDT 2010


Hi David, thanks for your continued work on this.  We've got so much to 
discuss in Dublin anyway that I'm hoping we can resolve this by email.

I only discovered the Google search box on tei-c.org a few weeks ago, 
after first bringing up this idea initially.  As you point out, it's not 
included on any pages underneath

http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/

(which is where I spend most of my time) and this is exactly the place 
where it would be most useful.  Even seeing the box, it hadn't occurred 
to me that you could add parameters, as you've done already for 
searching P5 and P4.

Frankly, I like the drop-down search box even more than virtual hosts 
since it suggests a mechanism to users for searching just the guidelines 
(or a particular language version) rather than hoping they know about 
tricks like using "site:" in a Google query.  The only disadvantage is 
that I can't do a search directly from my Google search box in my 
browser by using the "site:" syntax.  I can live without this.

As for it being misleading that the non-English versions have some (or 
mostly) English-language content in them, someone who understands the 
i18n infrastructure should weigh in.

So, my vote is to remove the virtual hosts and add the Google search box 
to the P5 HTML pages.  If it's appropriate to also offer searches of P5 
in other languages besides English, I would have these as additional 
drop-down options.

On 20/04/2010 21:59, David Sewell wrote:
> All,
>
> The Guidelines virtual language hosts are now working. See linked pages at
>
> http://lister.ei.virginia.edu/~drs2n/test-links.html
>
> At the moment links from Spanish pages to other languages are broken but
> I've asked Shayne to correct the rewrite rule.
>
> HOWEVER... after all that work, I'm wondering if it is really worth
> advertising the results to the TEI community. There are a couple of issues.
>
> 1. If we claim to have language-specific P5 Guidelines hosts, it will seem
> all the more strange that we do not offer genuine complete translations of
> the Guidelines into any language besides English, and that most links will
> lead to macaronic pages that mingle English text with definitions and
> sometimes examples in another language.
>
> 2. I wish I had realized this sooner, but we did *not* need virtual
> hosts to enable searching on only French, German, etc., Guidelines
> localization. This can be done very easily using the appropriate Google
> search parameters. See the proof of concept in the bottom half of my
> test-links.html page (and look at the HTML source to see how it is
> done).
>
> Try searching for "application" using each of the 3 search options. When you
> do this in French, sure enough the French examples page for<appInfo>  is
> the top hit. Even though most of the text there is in English...! And the
> French version of the<application>  ref page is near the top as well.
>
> The existing search box on most TEI-C pages could be extended this way. In
> addition, do we want to automatically generate a search box at the top of
> the HTML pages for the P5 Guidelines? It is inconsistent not to have one.
>
> I would suggest that if there is space on the April Council meeting agenda,
> perhaps you can discuss some of these things and come to decisions about
> exactly how you would like to present the Guidelines localizations and the
> search interface.
>
> David
>


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