From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Mon Jul 24 2006 - 08:32:15 CDT
Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:
>>> I am developing a multilingual website. After considering various
>>> options, I've gone with a subdomain for each language
>>> (IT,FR,DE,JP,KR,ZH).
>>
>> Just as a side note, the standard language codes for Japanese and
>> Korean
>> are JA and KO, not JP and KR.
>
> For subdomain names, he can choose whatever codes he likes and wants
> within his own domain domain name, this has no impact on the
> applications.
Of course he can. He can designate Italian as QQ and French as ZZ if he
likes. But using standard codes consistently will present fewer
surprises, both to himself and to users who see the URL or have to type
it manually.
> Note that domains in the TLDs use country codes, not language codes,
> so for consistency (if he also applied for ccTLD domains) he mayt have
> simplified his setting, so that people can connect either to
> http://www.example.it or http://it.example.com/ or even
> http://www.example.com/it/ indifferently (his setting depends on the
> way the werver maps domain names to actual resources, and it may be
> inconvenient to use different codes for ccTLDs and subdomains.)
But then he should be consistent in that direction, and use CN, TW, HK,
etc. for the various Chinese-speaking locales, instead of a single code
ZH.
> The good question is then about which URL his users will remember more
> easily, and which one he wants to advertize and make available in his
> server configuration. If he wants to target Japanese users, they are
> used to see "jp" in domain names, so it seems logical to use
> "jp.example.com" (or www.example.jp if available, or another localized
> domain name in ".jp"), as many users will expect "jp" and not "ja" in
> URLs. country codes are much more wellknown than language codes.
If you are identifying languages, use language codes. If you are
identifying countries, use country codes. Switching back and forth
between the two is usually a sign that the person needs to rethink the
localization problem he or she is trying to solve.
-- Doug Ewell Fullerton, California, USA http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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