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AhmadMoslem
Starting Member
15 Posts |
 Posted - 19 September 2002 : 23:00:56
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all,
having lost the remainder of my hair trying to write utf asp, and not being content with the end result at (the very good) forum of Moataz,
http://www.moataz.net
I decided to dig into the M$ files a bit ...
They suggest writing what you what to have a unicode in a database, then load the contents into an array, then, call each 'element' by ASP and display it as such.
Well, it works!
I got the main site:
http://www.muslimeen.co.uk
working after translating the ASP portal thingie,
then the forum
http://www.muslimeen.co.uk/vb4
so far I did 800 elements and it all seems pretty ok,
please tell us what you think,
if all goes well, then I will just release the LCID3037,
and Snitz will have an Arabic version soon.
Q for Bozden please ...
Bozden, can I write the Snitz name as ÔÑßÉ ÅÊÕÇáÇÊ ÔäíÊÒ ?
thing is most of my visitors don't really care what Snitz means in English ..
What do you think?
Ahmed< |
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n/a
deleted
593 Posts |
Posted - 19 September 2002 : 23:24:25
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Your Forum is showing Arabic correctly
(meaning, rendering/representing charsets/fonts in Arabic in html...though not sure what they mean at all...) in Arabic (Windows)(1256)....but not in other Arabic nor in UTF-8.
Believe what it does is the same as they explain about ASP.NET utilzing unicode internally but "convert" ASP file data to a respective locale encoding scheme in HTML...
From: ASP.NET Quick Tutorial - INTERNATIONALIZATION...
quote:
ASP.NET internally uses Unicode. In addition, ASP.NET utilizes the String class of the .NET Framework class library and the related utility functions, which are also internally Unicode. When interfacing with the outside world, ASP.NET can be configured in several ways to use a defined encoding, which includes the encoding of .aspx files, request data, and response data. For example, it is possible to store .aspx files with Unicode encoding and convert the HTML output of a page to an ANSI code page like ISO-8859-1.
Nice layout (L-R direction) in the forum. User I/F remaining in English... as it seems - or you are "translating" langNNNN.asp?
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Taku
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AhmadMoslem
Starting Member
15 Posts |
Posted - 20 September 2002 : 01:32:25
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well, the translation takes places in an external mdb file mate, the asp just picks up the strings from there, and dumbs them out,
mind you there are a couple of things that I dicovered,
if you go about translating INSIDE the asp file, then say ok to 'interdev' when it moans about the utf chars,
then the characters come out as ?????????????????? ?????? ?????????? in the output,
but then again this happens in this version anyway,
and the workaround about it is to go and tell asp that the charset is actually 1256, then works ok.
Appreciate that the lingo is a bit mad for the westerner eyes, but believe you me mate,
ALL ARABIC IS THE SAME.
I don't really see any difference between Egyptian, Saudi, Lybian, or even Morrocan Arabic,
perhaps the keyboards do differ in the layout, but there is abolutely ZERO difference in the language.
Perhaps this could tell Bozden not to bother with the localisation issues.
I think if someone is Arab then he will understand Egyptian Arabic as it the most common accent.
after all there are more Egyptian TV actors, soabs, and all sorts of crab than there are in any other Arab nation.
Well, that's just my knowledge.
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n/a
deleted
593 Posts |
Posted - 20 September 2002 : 04:24:45
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Well, there are different approaches in handling encoding issues and locale/LCID etc. and localization in general.... these are not all one to one in many ways, as you mentioned. And perhaps there is no one "absolute" best approach, as needs/requirements of users may differ significantly....At least it is primarily "text" information rendering on the web which we are talking about... if you get other items such as cultural preferneces/coloring etc. for images/graphics and forum color adopatation...then some of the variant cultural and other considerations come into "localization" issues.... while maintaining flexibility and degree of cusomization you can do with Snitz and probably the best packaged install for deploying the forum out there....
I for one is very much in agreement with Bozden's efforts in designing and enabling architecture for "internationalization" ....
Anyway, it's good that an old approach for Far Eastern language to have top-down right2left page layout formats is not a prevailing requirement - imagine that, it will complicate all design requirements further...... it's complicated enough to have Arabic styple of page formatting....
Cheers< |
Taku
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Deleted
deleted
4116 Posts |
Posted - 22 September 2002 : 06:21:21
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quote:
Originally posted by AhmadMoslem
if all goes well, then I will just release the LCID3037,
and Snitz will have an Arabic version soon.
Selam Ahmed,
This will be great, especially if you can help in testing bi-di (i.e. bidirectional text) related stuff I'll include in v4b04 
quote:
Q for Bozden please ...
Bozden, can I write the Snitz name as ÔÑßÉ ÅÊÕÇáÇÊ ÔäíÊÒ ?
thing is most of my visitors don't really care what Snitz means in English ..
What do you think?
I know that Arabic letters are nice to look, but I don't think this is possible. The word "Snitz" has no translatable meaning, it is a brand name. Also according to copyright, it must be kept there .
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 Stop the WAR! |
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RichardKinser
Snitz Forums Admin
USA
16655 Posts |
Posted - 22 September 2002 : 07:50:22
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| That is correct, you can not "translate" the Powered By Logo/Text Link to anything, it must remain as is.< |
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AhmadMoslem
Starting Member
15 Posts |
Posted - 22 September 2002 : 20:40:36
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As for the logo,
ok, alright, it was just an idea, I left it as it is anyway.
I have a topic (which is going to be sticky one day)
on how to get a copy of the forum.
I will hopefully try to explain what Snitz is all about.
GPL is not easy to explain in Arabic, believe you me :)
The more important stuff ...
In case you don't know, there is 1 unified Arabic language,
which is that used by the scholars and the governments and so on.
This is the language in which the Quran, the Torah, and the Arabic version of the Bible are written in.
So if you are an Arab, and you can read, you MUST understand it.
And a quick look at the Jelsoft product VBulletin shows it.
Believe me guys, there nothing such as "normalize"-"normalise" in Arabic.
now what I have is the following,
1- the 4 litle GIF's
2- a file called "all.mdb", which has all the strings ..
1686 entries, size=220k ONLY.
3- a file called "tp.asp",
all it does it create an arrays, (1686) long,
then reads all the strings from all.mdb
then shuts down "all.mdb" to save on resources.
((I am going to move this step to be done PER SITE,
rather than PER USER,
so that the whole array is done once in a life time.
4- a file called Lang3037.asp,
this has the str**********=array(1 ....1686)
5- Now once the user comes in, the whole things goes whisting.
IF you wish Bozden please send me a blank email at
ahmad@muslimeen.co.uk,
and copies of the three files will sent to you striaght away.
-----------------------------------------
On another note, I need help with the site/forum integration please guys,
as the cookie gets assigned to the site, and the forum does not really wish to know ...
thanks all
Will
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AhmadMoslem
Starting Member
15 Posts |
Posted - 22 September 2002 : 20:42:33
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also please use me as you wish in Bi-Di testing,
just 4 yr knowledge,
all stuff has been done pretty well w/out needing to add too many "rtl" tags,
guess the one @ default.asp should be enough.
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Deleted
deleted
4116 Posts |
Posted - 23 September 2002 : 09:14:38
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quote:
Originally posted by AhmadMoslem
As for the logo,
ok, alright, it was just an idea, I left it as it is anyway.
I have a topic (which is going to be sticky one day)
on how to get a copy of the forum.
I will hopefully try to explain what Snitz is all about.
GPL is not easy to explain in Arabic, believe you me :)
It is just like "Windows operating system" from "Microsoft", this time free and done by people 
quote:
The more important stuff ...
In case you don't know, there is 1 unified Arabic language,
which is that used by the scholars and the governments and so on.
This is the language in which the Quran, the Torah, and the Arabic version of the Bible are written in.
So if you are an Arab, and you can read, you MUST understand it.
And a quick look at the Jelsoft product VBulletin shows it.
Believe me guys, there nothing such as "normalize"-"normalise" in Arabic.
Thank you for the info. On the other hand, to use Arabic, you don't need to be an Arab or Muslim. What we have done so far is based on LCID (Locale ID), which also includes other elements than language strings. What about numbers, date-time representation, sorting etc?
For example compare Arabic-Algeria (link http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/nlsweb/default.asp?submitted=1401) with Arabic-Qatar (link http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/nlsweb/default.asp?submitted=4001).
Also there can be other changes related to culture in these countries.
In short, what I'm trying to do is NOT just change the language, but allow a backbone for multiple languages and multiple cultures. For example one user can easily convert the language used lo local mouths. An extreme exmample can be a music related web site, providing "Metal", "Jazzy" languages .
quote:
now what I have is the following,
1- the 4 litle GIF's
2- a file called "all.mdb", which has all the strings ..
1686 entries, size=220k ONLY.
3- a file called "tp.asp",
all it does it create an arrays, (1686) long,
then reads all the strings from all.mdb
then shuts down "all.mdb" to save on resources.
((I am going to move this step to be done PER SITE,
rather than PER USER,
so that the whole array is done once in a life time.
4- a file called Lang3037.asp,
this has the str**********=array(1 ....1686)
5- Now once the user comes in, the whole things goes whisting.
A couple notes on these:
- This is what we tried before and found less usefull & performing than the current approach. Check here for a performance measure done by ruirib.
- In v3.4 there are more than 2000 strings for sure
- When you mean "once perwebsite" I assume you are talking about the application object. The application object is run per application (e.g. web or forum installation), re-starts when the web server is restarted. Keeping more than 200KB per language in an application object will kill the server unless it is a dedicated one. Most of these shared servers have at least 100-200 websites per server. In the extreme case, 100 websites with forums, 2 languages per forum will result to 100*2*0.2MB = 40 MB memory space at least. Also the application object is 12 times slower than a simple variable...
quote:
IF you wish Bozden please send me a blank email at
ahmad@muslimeen.co.uk,
and copies of the three files will sent to you striaght away.
I sent you an e-mail
quote:
On another note, I need help with the site/forum integration please guys,
as the cookie gets assigned to the site, and the forum does not really wish to know ...
I didn't understand the problem here
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Stop the WAR! |
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AhmadMoslem
Starting Member
15 Posts |
Posted - 29 September 2002 : 23:09:58
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quote:
Originally posted by bozden
In short, what I'm trying to do is NOT just change the language, but allow a backbone for multiple languages and multiple cultures. For example one user can easily convert the language used lo local mouths. An extreme exmample can be a music related web site, providing "Metal", "Jazzy" languages .
to be perhectly honest I think it is too difficult to explain to you,
but perhaps someone someday will realise that fact.
I mentioned the bit about Jelsoft's VBulleting and how it is used in only one form.
Micro$oft are too pushy, they have the resources,
but for us it is going to be impossible to get all Arab countries' versions.
For many reasons:
1- The availability of translators to local version in all countries.
2- The differences are so few, nearly nonexistent.
3- In some Arab countries, there are those don't even speak Arabic, such as Algeria for example.
quote:
A couple notes on these:
- This is what we tried before and found less usefull & performing than the current approach. Check here for a performance measure done by ruirib.
- In v3.4 there are more than 2000 strings for sure
- When you mean "once perwebsite" I assume you are talking about the application object. The application object is run per application (e.g. web or forum installation), re-starts when the web server is restarted. Keeping more than 200KB per language in an application object will kill the server unless it is a dedicated one. Most of these shared servers have at least 100-200 websites per server. In the extreme case, 100 websites with forums, 2 languages per forum will result to 100*2*0.2MB = 40 MB memory space at least. Also the application object is 12 times slower than a simple variable...
1- Sorry mate, but I just can not understand a word of what is in that conv.
Perhaps I am stupid, but this is the end result.
What exactly is the current approach? tell me please and I WILL do it your way.
2-Yes I left out a couple of things which are specific to moderators,
well, thinking that if you can't read English then how did you get here?
This is nothing to do with racism. It's just that I depend on a moderator to take care of things for me, if he can't read the lingo, then perhaps he can't do the job.
3-you are right, and please suggest and guide me to what you think is better.
quote:
On another note, I need help with the site/forum integration please guys,
as the cookie gets assigned to the site, and the forum does not really wish to know ...
I didn't understand the problem here
When someone tries to login, he is told that the login has been successful,
but yet he is not logged in properly, and I believe that this is to do with the fact that there is actually a 'site' login which gets the user a cookie,
so what I need to know now is how to make the 'forum' authenticate using the 'site' cookie,
I mean I just want to unify the login site & forum together.
Thanks so much for the help guys..
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Edited by - AhmadMoslem on 29 September 2002 23:14:11 |
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Deleted
deleted
4116 Posts |
Posted - 30 September 2002 : 06:34:51
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We don't have translators around here, we also don't have the resources M$ has. But we have people, members of Snitz . We don't try to make all languages/locales available, we provide the backbone and if an Algerian comes around here (s)he can prepare the language pack. We'll be more than happy if (s)he shares her/his job with everybody around here.
We are using language files (langNNNN.asp, where NNNN is the LCID value of the country). In the language files we initialize the language variables and refer them from other ASP files. It is the most speedy way of doing it. It would also support UTF-8 by saving only the language file ias utf-8...
If you want to have a translation, I'd advise to wait for v4b04 to prevent duplicate work.
In the login problem: Set the cookie to site, delete your cookies and re-try. It is better to use the Snitz authentication in site login...
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