Blog: Content

The State of Internationalization

The point of this post is to do a round up for the community, get on the same page with some of the developers, and find a path toward what to do for Drupal 6 core and beyond, as well as with contributed modules. Many thanks to Jose Reyero and Gabor Hojtsy for helping me get this piece to provide an accurate summary of internationalization’s main points and its direct contributions. Some words are paraphrased, others are directly quoted. You'll also see below how the Drupal group has really helped surface a lot of issues, viewpoints, and case studies.

I can’t say how many times I’ve heard about the value of the elevator speech – a spiel given in the length of an elevator ride to further a cause or company – but I know few people who have mastered it. The same goes with online writing. Not enough organizations quickly get their point across in a way that their audience can understand and remember. This is paramount for the success any website.

But like the elevator speech, anyone can master it. These are the questions you have to answer:

We're investing some research and development into TinyMCE and are collecting all the complaints from our clients and anyone else who uses it, as well as comparing to the reported issues on Drupal. We're talking about usability issues, not failure for it to load or run in the first place. Please reply in a comment or send us an email with any complaints or issues you have with TinyMCE that are not on the list below. We'll let you know if we're able to improve anything and post what we find.

Documented TinyMCE issues:

-paragraph / line break inconsistencies
(if you have this issue, please explain it in more detail)

-bolding of the entire content when bolding single element

I installed a pre-forms API upgrade version of TinyMCE on Drupal 4.6/4.7 running on the TinyMCE 2.0RC. Until you really use it, it's hard to know what will make it better. Then, once you use it, you use it or get used to it in a way slightly different from another person. What if it just worked right for everyone?

Over the past few weeks I took a look at several modules that deal with relating nodes and links to other nodes within the Drupal system. Last week at Drupal Con AMS 2005 Ber Kessels presented on relations systems in Drupal. Defining relations within content can serve as an important supplementary navigation system, particularly on websites where users do not rely on a main navigation system to find content.

For example, take a site like Yahoo! News. If I go to Yahoo! News on a daily basis I first check the headlines. If I find an important article
to read and follow the link to read the article, on the article's page I am given several choices at the bottom of the page. Often, the choices include to select to read other articles based on the same topic as the story I just read, to see related photos, to read related opinion articles, or to read stories that fall under the same topic as the story I read. I may initially use the main navigation system to go and read top articles in the business section, and  once I find the article that interests me and I read it, I can use the website's relations system to read other content related to my attraction.

Here are some tips I recently found on writing effectively for the web, mostly from Jakob Nielson who studies web usability.

Make your information easy to read by breaking text up with:

• Paragraph breaks.
• Headings and subheadings
• Bullets
• Tables
• Hyperlinks to split up long pages

Also, white space around text makes it easier to scan and black text on a pale background is the easiest to read.

Make sure your readers find what you write useful.

• Write as specifically and as focused as you can
• Provide readers with full information on your topic, whether through text or links to websites on the same topic

Be concise.

• Omit unnecessary words
• Stick to your topic
• Avoid repetition
• What you write should be half as long as what you would write for a print publication

Edit your work.