On URL internationalisation October 9th, 2008
My confrère Simon Batistoni, internationalisation engineer at flickr wrote a very interesting article1 on URL internationalisation.
There are two possible schools of thought on this – one which would argue that the photo page http://www.flickr.com/photos/hitherto/257018778/ with a French interface is materially different to the same page when presented with an English interface. The French page, we might argue, should be named http://fr.flickr.com/photos/hitherto/257018778/, http://www.flickr.com/fr-FR/photos/hitherto/257018778/ or something similar.
On the other hand (and, in fact, the hand we eventually chose), the real “resource” here is the photo (and associated metadata) which the page points to – the interface is immaterial to the content we’re presenting. The big advantage of this approach, especially in a multi-lingual world, is that everyone gets the experience best suited to them.
Simon also emphases the major downside of internationalising a website with one single, immaterial interface.
The biggest downside to our current URL approach comes when search engines try to index our content. Since we don’t have language-specific URLs (and search engine crawlers aren’t in the habit of changing their language settings and retaining the necessary cookies), everything which search engines index on Flickr comes from our English-language interface.
He also says that “the core of what we do is focused around images” and he’s very right. Actually, choosing one method or another depends a lot of your content.
In Flickr’s case, the main content is a photo. To me it doesn’t really matter in which language I watch a photo on a website, it doesn’t affect its perception or its understanding.
In Last.fm’s case, the content is multiple. There is music —granted— but also lots of text. How many people are dragged by music from Google to Last.fm? Not many. On the other hand the artist biographies, journals, events, shoutboxes do. In this case, having separate interfaces is the right way to do it2. Web crawlers reference the content in the different languages and increases the visibility of the very same website in the different languages.
But yeah, I think the Flickr guys made the right decision.
Footnotes
Well I guess it is interesting if you have a minimum of interest in Internationalisation. ↩ Although I would not recommend having a multi-domain website, it adds a heck of complexity. ↩