Blog for The Well Designed URLs Initiative

Another URLian has appeared: Brad Fults. Brad just added himself to our wiki and became a signatory; thanks Brad! Better yet, on his user page on our wiki he linked to his post Designing URLs for Multilingual Web Sites; execellent job Brad!

That was a subject I’ve been planning to write for a while, and I’ll probably cover the issue in the future to here on the WDUI Blog to future the conversation but I doubt I could have done as good a job as Brad for my first post on the subject.

One option he did not cover was using using language in filenames, such as #1 - an extention:

example.com/bar/baz.en-US
example.com/bar/baz.en-GB
example.com/bar/baz.de

Or a #2 - suffix to an extension (note I had to add an .html extension for this option):

example.com/bar/baz.html.en-US
example.com/bar/baz.html.en-GB
example.com/bar/baz.html.de

Or as an #3 - extension prefix (also needed an .html extension):

example.com/bar/baz.en-US.html
example.com/bar/baz.en-GB.html
example.com/bar/baz.de.html

Or as an #4 - filename prefix:

example.com/bar/en-US.baz
example.com/bar/en-GB.baz
example.com/bar/de.baz

Or #5 - one level up in the path:

example.com/bar/en-US/baz
example.com/bar/en-GB/baz
example.com/bar/de/baz

Unlike Brad, I didn’t provide an evaluation of these simply because I haven’t researched the subject enough at this time. Maybe he can do a follow up post providing an evaluation of each of these.

However, I can say I don’t really like any of these options, nor are any of the options Brad provides sit well with me except possibly his “Modified Directory Structure (#2)” combined in creative ways with his “Use of Accept-Language HTTP Header (#6)” the latter a.k.a. Content Negotiation. Whatever the case, there will be more on this subject in the future, I’m sure, and it’s good to have this discussion taking place.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Champions, Website Owners, Internet Professionals, Commentary, International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.