ICU site redesign

[Elango Cheran]

Hi everyone,

This isn't a technical design proposal, but maybe people have opinions anyways.

The point is that ICU needs some long overdue attention, IMO. Here's my brief proposal for what I would like to do:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bUX93DTqihh97U7RYpmt1jlrM9d1d6Es3o0-aNCmZqY/edit?tab=t.0

Let me know if you have thoughts.

-- Elango

[Mark Davis Ⓤ]

Sounds good; that's what we did with CLDR; much easier to maintain (and a joy to get away from Sites). 

A few items to note:

• There was some tooling involved, so that this goes together. Steven can point you to that if you are interested.
• Sites doesn't really have an effective export, which is a pain
• Part way through, Google added Copy to Markdown, and it turned out to be pretty easy for most cases to copy the body text from the HTML in Sites, paste into Google Docs, fix up there a bit, then Copy to Markdown and paste in the target .md file.
• Tables are a pain if they have any interesting structure, such as merged cells. So part of the work in Google Docs is to change tables to a simpler format, that looks different but gets the point across.
• Sites was also painful because it was hard to find all the files — you can't export the directory structure! We ended up using an online tool to crawl the Sites and find all the files. Every now and then we find a file that was disconnected.
• We found it easiest to use exactly the URL structure from Sites, picking the corresponding .md file names and directories.
• We manage the whole site organization with one file:https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/blob/main/docs/site/sitemap.tsv. The pages are put into a visible directory structure based on that, which also is used to generate https://cldr.unicode.org/sitemap.
• Makes it very easy to move files around in the visible directory structure without changing where files are in github. 
• Anyway, if you are curious we have a doc the outlines the process.

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[Steven R. Loomis]

Importantly, we are using Cloudflare Pages instead of GitHub Pages. Two major benefits:

 - redirects supported - as a plain text file

 - preview URLs, we can preview changes on a PR before deplopy

I’m not happy with how internal links are structured right now. We went with sites-friendly URLs such as “https://cldr.unicode.org/somepage” which turns into “docs/site/somepage.md”.  Currently, relative links within the site MUST be site relative ( so,  “/somepage” not “./someotherpage” nor “../parentpage” etc. ).   This also has a major downside in that the links are not navigable from Github preview., but it makes them line up with the old sites url. Yes there’s a ticket for this, it’ll require munging every page including some scary blobs of extracted HTML from sites. (The less said there the better.) 

What I need to do is change how the resolver works, probably to use ALL relative links ( no “/“ just “../“ or “./“ ) - focus it around Github’s preview (for ease of local editing/viewing), and fixup the links (which i’m already doing..) at generation time to just deal with it.  

We have a mechanism that does a local preview via docker (with automatic regeneration of the site), plus the preview on PRs as i mentioned. 

happy to walk someone through how this works. 

-s

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[Steven R. Loomis]

+ Liang and Gregg

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[Markus Scherer]

+1

[Steven R. Loomis]

Thanks Liang.

If I can reduce some confusion, CLDR’s current solution is bare-metal because it didn’t start from zero: it was built to match the behavior of an existing site, that is, the old google sites page with all its own quirks, but with an expectation of matching Github Pages markdown transformation.  

It’s not what I would have picked if the site was starting from scratch, or if there were (as you noted) someone responsible for proper web design.

Also note that CLDR’s SurveyTool also leverages Vue, so this was chosen to be able to share some skills between CLDR components, potentially.

If there’s a more standard Unicode layout or even stylesheet, the CLDR site could certainly be migrated. It’s based off of the Unicode site and reports stylesheet.

- s

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Steven R. Loomis

Code Hive Tx, LLC

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On Jun 6, 2025, at 4:39 PM, Liang Hai (梁海) <lian...@gmail.com> wrote:

Great to see some momentum on the ICU side.

I also recommend starting such a migration project with a documentation-oriented framework, such as Starlight (mentioned in Elango’s doc, and already used by https://icu4x.unicode.org/) or VitePress (a more matured and popular solution for Vue users).

CLDR’s current solution is confusingly bare-metal (basically a nude Vue site) for a team where no one is responsible for proper web design.

Liang

[Markus Scherer]

On Mon, Jun 9, 2025 at 9:16 AM Steven R. Loomis <srl...@gmail.com> wrote:

Would it be worth disussing this at Unicode-Infra tomorrow? if Markus and Liang can get on (if there’s anything to discuss here)

I don't know if there is anything to discuss here with infra. If Elango wants infra-team feedback, then he and I can join.

[Elango Cheran]

There's nothing yet to discuss. When I have a proposal with more concrete details, then let's talk about it in the infra-team. In the meantime, it would be good to see what comments, if any, that we get on the high-level plan before & during the ICU-TC meeting Thursday.

[Steven R. Loomis]

Sounds good. 

[Steven R. Loomis]

Would it be worth disussing this at Unicode-Infra tomorrow? if Markus and Liang can get on (if there’s anything to discuss here) 

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Steven R. Loomis

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[Elango Cheran]

Hi everyone,

The ICU-TC in today's meeting agreed with the proposal. Thanks for all of the info here in this thread. That will be helpful as we begin doing the work.

Speaking of which, if any of you are interested in contributing to the work, reach out to me individually. We can choose and coordinate who does what. Once we're done with everything, we will have created a good and important cross-cutting resource.

-- Elango

[Steven R. Loomis]

I’m glad to hear it

for my part I’d be glad to explain anything from how CLDR”s setup works. 

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Steven R. Loomis

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