Multilingual web site based on different web pages extensions?

[eluser]DimCI[/eluser]
Thank you

[quote author="xwero" date="1245424431"]i like the out of the box idea but i think the url should contain the language that is not the default language. If the site has no default language the landing page should be a language selection splash page, for example the Belgian Apple site
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I guess to use both defaults - language and url_suffix.

the logic is: if the url requested contains any of the used url_suffix-es (=w/page/file extension), we use it.. if not (a user entered e.g. an URL like 'www.website.com/controller/function/') but the cookie contains both language and url_suffix values, we use these then... and if not (the very first visit e.g. 'www.website.com/')- we use defaults. no need to have language in the url in this case imho.

[quote author="xwero" date="1245424431"]
I wouldn't care too much about CEO because the page you are displaying in other languages has different content in the eyes of the search engines. The page in English can have a low pageranking but the page in russian a high one depending on how many backlinks the page has.
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i mean cookies usage in language determination first of all. Have no much knowledge in this. the idea is to implement each-page-language-switcher (small menu) in js to prevent different lang. pages crawling in one session. wanna to submit english web site like 'www.site.com/index.shtml' and russian like 'www.site.com/index.html', for example- so a crawler follows .shtml-s or .html-s depending on the submitted (start) page and does not even "see" the lang menu.
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[quote author="xwero" date="1245424431"]
The performance is a big question because there are multiple ways of doing this.

The biggest problem i can think of is you run out of valid extensions. Maybe you could use the international abbreviations of the languages as extension from the start, .ru/.en, but this could be confusing as some countries toplevel is abbreviated the same as a language which results in an url like site.ru/controller/method.ru.[/quote]

i did not think about such extensions. No need more than 2-4 languages in my case