Henry Story wrote:
Does Atom allow there to be multiple parallel renditions of a blog entry
in different languages?
So it is not really possible to put atom entries with the same id and
updated time stamp in a feed (without a SHOULD level violation) even if
they are translation of each other. That means that the Swiss would not
be able to publish a law with the same atom id in french and in german,
as they are obliged to publish these at the exact same time by law. (No
linguistic preference)
The Swiss may need to publish laws in multiple languages simultaneously, but
most users surely don't need to read those laws in multiple languages
simultaneously. Why waste their bandwidth including several translations in
one feed when it would be far more convenient if you just had a separate
feed for each language?
If you want to link the various translations together you can add one or
more link elements at the top of the feed with rel="alternate" and hreflang
set to the language of the alternate feed. If you're feeling really
enthusiastic you can include alternate links pointing to the translated html
pages for each entry too.
No extensions need to be made to the Atom spec. No wasted bandwidth by
having multiple translations in a feed that may not be used. But you can
still publish muliple language simultaneously by making sure you update all
feeds simultaneously. You could even publish all the feeds at the same URL,
serving the correct translation based on the HTTP Accept-Language header.
I may be missing something here, but it seems to me like a reasonable
solution to the problem.
Regards
James
