On Wednesday 13 April 2005 17:38, Lars Aronsson wrote:
Clearly, the Serbian Wikipedia cannot be the only
website in
Serbian. There must reasonably be other Serbian websites which
have already addressed and solved this problem, and from where you
can get ideas for a practical and working solution.
Some time ago, I wrote a text about this topic, so I believe that I am the
right person to answer to this.
There are several ways of having bi-alphabetic web site. If your web site is
static (that is, serving HTML files, no scripting), you have to create entire
tree of your site in both alphabets. There are tools which can help with
this, but there is nothing which you can just point to a Cyrillic web site
and which can output you entire Latin web site, so some work has to be done
manually. If you have a static site, but also the ability of scripting, a
simple solution could be a script which would upon a request load a static
page, transliterate it and serve it; but I've never seen this actually
implemented. If your web site is dynamic, but done in "raw" PHP or some other
language (you again have mostly HTML but use PHP to insert headers, footers
and the like), you can add a small script on top which, if requested, would
buffer entire page, transliterate it and output it; there is one excellent
tool for this though it has somewhat strange licensing, and of course it is
not hard to code such a thing from scratch. Finally, if your site is fully
dynamic, done over a CMS for example, you either have to use transliteration
built in the software (I don't know of any software having such a thing), or
you can use solution similar to one I mentioned, have a script which would
load a finished page, transliterate it and serve it (I believe I have seen
this a few times). Regardless of which way you use, a thing sometimes
overlooked are buttons and other images with inscriptions on them; they have
to exist in both variants too (and I wonder is this problem addressed in some
way on Chinese Wikipedia?).
However, and what is important for this discussion, everyone who has such a
site has primary variant in Cyrillic and makes Latin variant from it; I think
that only Radio Television of Serbia transliterates from Latin to Cyrillic,
but as one might guess it's doesn't turn out very nice.