[xsl] practicalities of multiple languages/character sets (newbie)

[Graham Seaman <graham@xxxxxxxx>]

hi,

I'm a newbie to xml/xslt.
Can anyone advise me whether what I want to do is practical, and if so
what problems I am likely to run into?

I run a small english-language open-source related web site. There will
soon be a Russian sister-site using cyrillic, and later perhaps a Japanese
site. We intend to exchange information between the sites, which will have
closely related contents but maybe quite different appearance.

I plan to have a separate (non-web) server for interchanging information
between sites. The information will be in xml, with an english-language
schema definition and english language field names, but the text contents
of the xml may be in any of the 3 (or more...) character sets. If the
character set/language is not that of the host site, the data may be
displayed on the site (using XSLT to output XHTML) with a request
for translation; once translated it will be merged with local data.

I believe this should be possible but am not sure what scale of practical
problems I'm likely to run into; and in particular what transformation
engines are most likely to be able to cope with this (all XSLT will be
server side and I can only use free software). Any advice?

Thanks
Graham


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