Techniques for multilingual Web sites:
Placement of links

How should the links to different language versions be placed on a page. It is obviously useful to use the same positioning on all pages of a site, but which? The following list presents some alternatives and their pros and cons:

• Top right (as on the previously mentioned EU pages). This makes the "languge menu" noticeable and a separate part of the page. On the other hand, its position is not suitable as regards to indexing robots, since it is natural to emphasize the content at the beginning of a page in indexing.
• Near the beginning of the page but after a heading and an introductory paragraph. This helps in the above-mentioned indexing problems, but it somewhat disturbs normal reading, since the links have not been separated suitably from the content proper.
• At or near the end of a page, as on the Debian pages. This minimizes the disturbance to normal reading, but on the other hand when a user has run into a page in a wrong language, he won't immediately see the availability of alternatives in other languages. Such a user normally doesn't even know that the site has some uniform system of language links.

Perhaps the optimal solution would be the following, if the language links take relatively small space (e.g. at most a dozen links, with language codes as link texts): Write the language links at the end of a document, but use style sheets to suggest, using absolute positioning, that they be physically positioned positioned at the beginning, into top right corner. In this small set of pages, the language links have been implemented that way. At the end of a page, there is a div element containing the links, and it has the attribute id="langlinks", and the style sheet contains this:

#langlinks { position: absolute; top:0.5em; right:0; 
   text-align: right;
   font-family: "Lucida Console", "Courier New", Courier, monospace;
   font-size:110% } 
h1 { margin-top : 1em; font-size: 125%; }

Thus a browser which does not support CSS positioning or ignores the style sheet rules for some reason, displays the links at the end of a page. A browser that supports the CSS features used displays the links in the top right corner in a relatively large monospace font.

In theory, we could use link elements to specify the language links, and this would leave it up to each browser to present them in a manner that is suitable for the browsing situation. Unfortunately this method still isn't supported by many popular browsers at all, so we can't build the linking upon them now or in the near future.

Next section: Language negotiation in the protocol.

2003-02-03 Jukka K. Korpela