New Site Design - http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/telux/Site-Hadash/

[Shlomi Fish]

On Wednesday 12 November 2008, Ori Idan wrote:
> ספרים וסיפורים שכתבתי: http://www.thestories.org
>
> On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 1:43 PM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il> wrote:
> > On Wednesday 12 November 2008, Ori Idan wrote:
> > > I think we should have a new site with hebrew only.
> >
> > The problem with this approach is that:
> >
> > 1. Our site won't be listed in dmoz.org and other such directories.
>
> Why do you think so? if the new site replaces the old one it would be
> listed.

The main dmoz.org directory lists only sites in English. There are localised 
versions too, however.

>
> > 2. Not all of the people who take part in Telux know Hebrew very well.
> > This is
> > while most of the Israeli Hebrew speakers also know English enough to
> > understand us.
>
> Most of the people do understand hebrew and if we want to appeal new
> audience we should speak the language most people speak.

Right. But creating an Hebrew-only site will discriminate against the minority 
which doesn't know English that well. Apache and other software can handle a 
dual-lingual site easily.

>
> > 3. Not all of the people who surf to our site know Hebrew.
>
> See previous section. Most people do speak hebrew and we appeal mainly to
> hebrew speaking people. Remember we live in Israel and Hebrew is the
> official language here. 

We don't appeal only to Hebrew-speaking people. What about immigrants? What 
about tourists? Etc. etc.

> (Why do I write this in eglish?...) 

The original email in this thread had translation in both languages. Then 
someone wrote an English-only version and it stuck.

>
> > > Since we can not translate all material, we should keep the old site
> > > with english (and some hebrew) and concentrate on a new site with new
> > > contents and maybe links to old site.
> >
> > The problem is that the data of the lectures is in English only, and will
> > take
> > a lot of time to translate. Having a site without this data would be
> > pointless.
>
> That is because for some reasons those who wrote the site wrote it in
> English.
> My lectures are written mostly in hebrew and all new lectures are always
> written in hebrew.

Yes, but what do we do about it? Is there any volunteer to translate them?

>
> > > I wonder why we had an English site in the first place.
> >
> > When I inherited the site, it was in mixed-Hebrew-and-English as well. I
> > kept
> > it this way, while adding the data of the lectures in English only out of
> > convenience.
>
> Convenience? I wonder how using a foreign language is convenient, however
> this is a fact so there is no point arguing about it.

Well, I find editing Hebrew text mixed inside Perl code, or Website Meta 
Language-markup, less natural than editing English text. (Because of Bidi, 
having to switch to a different keyboard, brain context switches, etc.)

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish
>
> > I don't support throwing away all the English content because of the
> > reasons I
> > mentioned above. If someone volunteers to translate the data from English
> > to
> > Hebrew (and possibly vice versa), I'd support him. Otherwise, I got
> > better things to do, like organise the next W2L series.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> >        Shlomi Fish

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
The Case for File Swapping - http://xrl.us/bjn7i

Shlomi, so what are you working on? Working on a new wiki about unit testing 
fortunes in freecell? -- Ran Eilam