Web Standards and Urdu
I was thinking about this whole thing last night and there is something I am a little worried about. I think that in our efforts to popularize Urdu blogs we should try to offer solutions which are standard compliance. Like here in this blog Zack is using post titles in the individual entries archive pages. I am afraid that this is probably not a good thing for Urdu posts. Like this URI:
http://urdu.zackvision.com/archives/2005/01/oeoeoeoeoe.html
It is not a good choice to use oeoeoeoeoe.html for many reasons. I think that entry numbers would be better in a bilingual blog or an Urdu blog. Same goes for dates we should make sure that the dates of our individual posts are visible in Urdu but are also available in English for search spiders to read and index our pages. We should also think about RSS feeds. RSS readers should be made aware of the fact that which feed is in Urdu. Language tags should always be used whenever possible.
Why these things are important at this point? Because if our efforts are going to increase the number of Urdu pages on the web then it is our responsibility to make these pages more readable, accessible and standard compliance for future. It would also help future web spiders to differentiate Urdu pages from Persian pages or Arabic pages.
I agree with Nabeel’s suggestion that English words should be used for technical reasons. Like at one point Asif used Urdu word “Tanseeb” for installation I think word installation is itself quite good and more popular in Urdu. Avoiding such words our documents would become more readable. Nabeel’s list is comprehensive. I also liked the suggestion of using an image based urdu page or an urdu image of details on how to install Urdu. It would help readers who are not able to understand English or people who are not much familiar with computing.
January 31st, 2005 at 6:46 pm
The individual entry URIs are definitely a problem. It’s because of a very US- and English-centric Movable Type code. Their
dirifycode does not treat even accented characters correctly. I’ll switch this blog over to the old entry ID method. However, any links to current entries would need to be accommodated.The same problem exists with Urdu category names and category archive URIs. However, that is easily solvable by using the category description field.
I must say I don’t like the crufty URIs you and Asif are generating in your blogs.
While we can have bilingual dates, I don’t get your point.
RSS/Atom feed is definitely something we need to look at in the near future.
On the language issue, I am agnostic.
February 1st, 2005 at 6:22 am
Danial: well to make something public is one thing, and a puritan approach is something else… Okay I will try to be more readable than eloquent while writing urdu for UrduWiki, but ofcourse my own blog is my den
February 1st, 2005 at 5:25 pm
Dates are an important thing lets say if we are displaying dates in Urdu on our blog then the only way to get the date thing right for spiders is our rss feed where a date in Urdu characters wouldn’t be readable by bots and crawlers. So we should make sure that our dates are available and readable by human and spiders alike.
Asif bhai I think that even some English words in our Urdu documents don’t look right so we need to rely on our own judgement about whether a particular term is easy to understand for majority of our readers or not.
February 1st, 2005 at 9:15 pm
دوستوں، سب سے پہلے تو شاباش اتنی جلدی اتنا سارا کام کرنے پر! میں بھی آپ کی مدد کرنا چاہتا ہوں۔ مجھے صرف بلاگر کا تجربہ ہے لیکن داینیال اس کے متعلق پہلے ہی لکھ چکے ہیں
میرے لائق کوئی اور کام ہو تو بتائیے۔
February 2nd, 2005 at 8:16 am
Dear Zia
There is a lot more you can do. I am trying to provide details about how to modify the style sheets of the blogger templates for appropriately displaying Urdu. It would be nice if you could provide details with example CSS snippets on how to adapt different sections of the blog template i.e. post body, archive links, post footer, comments etc. I have set up a link تفصیلات but I have not been able to fill any details until now. Feel free to provide you input in any form. Further you can post the adapted blogger template. I intend to create a repository of blogger templates which are ready to use for Urdu blogging. My idea is to provide thumbnail images of Urdu blogs that use these templates similar to the way shown in blogger.com. If you have experience of website design and programming, you can provide valuable content regarding Urdu computing.
Regards,
Nabeel
February 3rd, 2005 at 7:22 pm
p[ur](urdu).. ضیاء: آپ جس ظرح بھی مدد کر سکیں اچھا رہے گا۔ اور اگر اس بلاگ پر لکھنا چاہتے تو مجھے بتائیے۔
February 3rd, 2005 at 9:04 pm
Danial: The URLs have been fixed and the old ones redirected. The date is also bilingual now.
January 31st, 2006 at 7:48 pm
Hi
Soon I will launch a website with hundreds of ebooks in urdu. But im unable to find a perfect unicode converter (from inpage to unicode). If anybody can send me a link where I can find this. I have no money. If you want send me this directly please do ..
March 2nd, 2010 at 2:38 am
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