answered
Apr 30 '10
Pekka 500 ● 19 ● 26 ● 34 As to the basic idea of translating URLs I'd say yes, definitely translate them. It's a beautiful little detail.
It gets tough with the Unicode, though, I think. While all modern browsers can, to my knowledge, deal effortlessly with UTF-8 characters in URLs, it is possible that a translated URL shows up in many other places:
- In text files
- Copy+pasted into E-Mails and other forms of communication
- As a link on an external web page that has different encoding
- Read by client libraries that can't deal with UTF-8 characters (see for example here)
- Viewed in non-standard browsers
and so on. From what I can see looking around on SO, this is possible, but shaky.
For latin-based languages, I'd say translate them, but use ASCII characters only. That's how I would do it in the german translation, for one. Every language has their own, safe rules how to deal with that (in German, ä becomes ae, in Finnish, ä becomes a, and so on).
It's obviously not a solution for the rest of the world, and it would be nice to be able to have cyrillic, chinese, japanese, korean...... question texts in the URL. Hmm.
Update: I've posted a question on SO with good results. Apparently, percent-encoded URLs will work fine, and displayed correctly in the browser. Evgeny, what do you think?
