Restructuring Multilingual Web Sites

  • Authors:
  • F. Ricca;E. Pianta;C. Girardi

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • ICSM '02 Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'02)
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Current practice of Web site development does not addressexplicitly the problems related to multilingual sites.The same information, as well as the same navigation paths,page formatting and organization, are expected to be providedby the site independently from the chosen language.This is typically ensured by adopting personal conventionson the way pages are named and on their location in the filesystem. Updates are then performed manually and consistencydepends on the ability of the programmers not to missany impact of the change.In this paper an extension to XHTML, called MLHTML(MultiLingual XHTML), is proposed as the target representationof a restructuring process aimed at producing a maintainableand consistent multilingual Web site. MLHTMLcentralizes the language dependent variants of a page ina single representation, where shared parts are not duplicated.Existing sites can be migrated to MLHTML by meansof the algorithms described in this paper. After classifyingthe pages according to their language, a page alignmenttechnique is exploited to identify corresponding pages andto eliminate inconsistencies. Transformation into MLHTMLcan then be achieved automatically.