A basic walkthrough to avoid having problems with "funny characters" on your website.
Why think about multilingualism? Most developers bring up this question when asked about their websites. The common problem is that you do not matter about that stuff until someone fills in your comment form and his name suddenly displays funny characters (question marks, squares or other funny characters) in between. Now you have to think about it!
The biggest problem is that most developers lack knowledge about Internationalisation, Localisation, Character encodings, Unicode and all those terms connected with multilingualism. The following article should give you a basic understanding and show you how to avoid those funny characters.
This tutorial is for people who start or want to optimize the internationalization of their PHP Apps.
We wrote it due the lack of useful ressources. Although there are many tutorials for gettext out there it is still a very complicated issue.
Maybe you looked into it and thought “mhm the whole unix world uses it but it looks painful” - we too, but we didn’t give up that early ;)
Localizing an application can be planned, or it can happen as a rushed afterthought. Discover techniques and tools such as gettext, XML, XSLT, and design patterns that can help when retrofitting localization into a mature product or planning for localization up front.
Internationalization and localization of a web page is simply the act of setting it up to be able to handle displaying in multiple languages and adding those different languages in. There are many different ways in which to do this. One of the simplest is to just make sure that all your strings that you ever output are stored as variables or constants in an included file. That way, you can make multiple copies of that file,each with different language versions written into them. Just include the appropriate file for the language that you want to display.
This idea can be extended to images as well because any image with text on it would also need translated. Just define the imgsrc of each image in your included file as well.
Tower of Babel
PHP in the Past
Unicode and Locales
PHP in the Future
Current Status
One of the main concerns of internationalization consists of separating the main source code from the texts, the labels, the messages and all the other objects related to the specific language in use. This facilitates the translation process as such as all the resources related to the local language context are well identified and separated.
In a global market the costs to translate and update the texts (including labels, messages, menu elements and so on) can easily become quite high. This is the context where the TMX standard comes to help by applying to the translation and management process of these texts the concepts of reuse, increase of consistency, and the shortening of the production cycle. All this with the added bonus of cutting the development costs.
Derick Rethans Konferenzvortrag über die Realisierung von mehrsprachigen Seiten auf Basis von Unicode und Transliteration.
Unless you are one of those who writes everything you write from inside one of those behemoth office-style word (or is it world?) processors, a fast, convenient, powerful, and stand-alone spell checker is a very hand thing to have around. Luckily for us in the Unix/Linux world, we've had one forever: it's called Ispell. Climb down out of that rodent-driven environment you spend too much time in for awhile, and I'll show you.
Simon Moss continues his series on GIS Mapping. This article details a quick hack for implementing location-to-URL reverse lookup functionality.
There are a number of great online GIS ( Geographic Information System ) solutions out there, ranging from Mappoint to Mapquest to some cool PHP projects. However, it is still nice to be able to be able plot you own data and put some basic mapping utilities on your site with a minimum of fuss and bother. Over the next couple of articles I will hopefully be able to give you a few pointers on how to create you own basic GIS system for free. I do not claim to be a GIS expert, and there may be better ways to do things, but hopefully these articles will give you a start in the right direction.
