DS-IRM Clarification

[jgbull]

Greetings All,

I need a little clarification on how DS-IRM subdomains work.

I maintain the site www.rightsandresources.org. Currently I am having the entire site translated into both French and Spanish.

I wish to create the subdomains: espanol.rightsandresources.org and francais.rightsandresources.org

From my current understanding of the DS-IRM, when a user visits espanol.rightsandresources.org they will be redirected to rightsandresources.org/espanol (or some other directory of my choosing).

Is it possible for them not to be redirected? I would prefer that users wouldn't see themselves being shifted to a folder of the main site, but instead continue to navigate the subdomain (ie. they would go to espanol.rightsandresources.org/programmas/index.html instead of rightsandresources.org/espanol/programmas/index.html).

Another question on how subdomains work:

If I use absolute links in common files (like a javascript menu for example) will a link such as /programmas/index.html go to the root directory of my main site? Or is it possible to create a subdomain that has a root directory of its own (so that I don't have to put /espanol/ in front of all links...)

I'm a bit of a newbie, so my apologies in advance if this is unclear...

Thanks!

JB

[Bob]

Hello,

A DS-IRM works just like an IRM in that your visitors will see the domain address as they entered it and not the subdirectory address in their browser location.

If you have a DS-IRM called espanol.rightsandresources.org that is mapped to rightsandresources.org/espanol when you access http://espanol.rightsandresources.org you will see the contents of the subdirectory but the browser location bar will still show the subdomain address.

Absolute links in an IRM or DS-IRM directiry should work properly as long as accessed via the IRM/DS-IRM domain name as far as I know.

-Bob

[jgbull]

Great! Thanks!

Would the subdomain support a "ç" in francais or an "ñ" in espanol?

JB

[Bob]

All domain names, including subdomains must meet specified naming conventions and as far as I know can only contain letters, numbers or dashes and no other punctuation.

-Bob

[kitchin]

Browsers are starting to support IDN, internationalized domain names (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name), but I don't know about subdomains. The trick is Punycode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode), which uses a "xn--" prefix to signify special encoding. (Double hyphens are not legal in a normal domain name.) Example from Wikipedia:

http://xn--tdali-d8a8w.lv
means
http://tūdaliņ.lv

[hobbes]

ICANN just ran a successful test of internationalized domain names; however the system is not yet officially available. You will find some registries selling internationalized domains, but your mileage may vary on support.

[Bob]

Actually doing further research on this I see that .org is one of the TLD providers that support IDN in select languages but only a handful of Domain Registrars provide registration for IDNs.

Also as it does not appear that ICANN has yet formally ratified IDN at the Root level it would appear that support is very limited at this time.

Supporting IDN will require a full overhaul of our DNS system and until such time as it is completely officially supported FutureQuest will not be considering adding IDN support.

-Bob

[kitchin]

Hi Bob, all you have to do is allow double hyphens, right?

[Stecyk]

I erased my prior response. I commented that DS:IRM feature does not properly show up on the logs. However, that is not what the OP was asking.