On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 07:08:46AM -0800, Mike Orr quoted:
> > cookie may be used _only_ to identify a user session. So, should all
> > urls include 'en' or 'fr' etc somewhere? And where should it be? At the
> > beginning, at the end, between the last object identifier and the verb,
> > as a query string parameter? Or is it acceptable to have this
> > information to be remembered, so if I send a URL for a resource (that I
> > read in english) to my japanese friend, shouldn't she be automatically
> > shown the japanese version?

This gets into metaphysical questions about data: are 'document X' and
'Japanese translation of document X' two distinct objects, or just two
different representations of the same object?  This issue is a source
of many boring xml-dev and RDF discussions.

Personally, I think this is a decision up to the person designing the
model being mapped to URLs.  If it's useful to be able to refer
explicitly to the Japanese version, e.g. translations are separate
objects, you might well want to put /jp/ or some other indicator in
the URL.  If not, you might put them all at one URL and rely on HTTP's
language negotation features to choose the appropriate representation.
I might do this for, say, the URL representing the Python FAQ.

--amk