Hi all,
i think i should share my thoughts about this discussion :)
I like the idea of xx.inkscape.org, but i guess it needs some administrative effort. /xx/ has the advantage, that relative links can be used. (i just replaced $root="" with $root="../" and the links work) For subdomains, we would need to copy all files to all domains, or use full-length-paths for all the images and stuff... also, multi-subdomains are harder to test on local webservers.
That .php.xx thing sounds also good, but it has disatvantages: I (and surely others, too) don't want to be bound to one language. I could change the preferences of my browser each time i want to see another language or use two browsers, but hey, come on...
On my website caligamedia.de i did it using php. Thats more flexible. (hopefully you forget that go-back-to-static quickly ;) )
<?PHP $UA_LANGUAGE = $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'];
if($HTTP_GET_VARS['lang'] == 'de') $language = 'de'; elseif($HTTP_GET_VARS['lang'] == 'en') $language = 'en'; elseif(substr($UA_LANGUAGE, 0, 2) == 'de') $language = 'de'; else $language = 'en';
include($root.'addons/global_const.inc'); ?>
What does it? It checks, if there is something like ...index.php?lang=de in the URL (this is set by clicking my well-known flags ;) ) if this is NOT set, it checks what language is preferred by the browser. If the preferred language is not available, it defaults to english. This means: auto-language by default, user language if desired, english if these fail.
the pages themselves have no texts in it, only layout. long texts are in include-files, single words, like menu entries, in constants, defined in global_const.inc
if you like this idea, too, i'll do it... This needs neither /xx/ nor xx.inkscape.org, as its all in the same file. because i need to change all the inter-site-links. i need to add something like <?php echo "?lang=$lang" ?> to all of them, so that the chosen language remains on page changes.
The links should be updated anyway, as they need a similar postfix for the CSS setting, which is turned off on each page-change. If done this way, the links of the flags can be easily set to point to the current page instead of the main page.
hmm... as i think about it... i guess this would also be a solution to the problem, that new news do not automatically appear on /xx/ pages. with the above way, there could be some code that checks if news-yyyymmdd-01.xx.inc does exist, and, if not use news-yyyymmdd-01.EN.inc instead.
Okay, that were my... 2 or 3 euro cents :)
Greetings, Daniel