[✨]Non-Routable URL Route Param

[mhevery]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

1. Imagine I have my application which has a set of routes: ['/', '/[item]']
2. Now, I would like to internationalize the application. The way I would like to do this is to add /[lang]/ as a prefix to my routes. So the new routes are really ['/[lang]/', '/[lang]/[item]'].

How can I achieve the above today?
There are couple of issues we run into:

1. there is no easy way to create route prefixes
2. Within the application the best practice is to have absolute URLs. This creates an issue since the URL now contains a prefix.

Describe the solution you'd like

When creating an application, I would like to:

1. Specify a prefix param that should be outside of my application routes.
2. Have URL building take the prefix into account.

Describe alternatives you've considered

explicitly add /[lang] into the application route.

Issues:

• When building routes it may be hard to know the current lang
• navigation across lang should never be SPA (always MPA). Really navigation across lang is a different website.

Additional context

No response

[wmertens]

Would it be an option to use <base href="/en" /> in the head?

[wmertens]

Another option: just use $localize

<a href={$localize`/blog/${slug}`}>Blog Post about {slug}</a>

Each locale gets to decide the translation, and the routes have to be able to accept those.
Meaning, the urls could be /le-blog/${slug} but also /fr/blog/${slug}. One or more layout.tsx files must have an onGet that uses the URL to decide the language.

I think this would just work?

To make it easier to write i18n routes, qwik-city could also accept comma-separated directory names. It can be useful for apps with only a few languages: /src/routes/blog,le-blog,der-blog/layout.tsx.

[mhevery]

Would it be an option to use <base href="/en" /> in the head?

That is an interesting idea, but how would it work? Mainly when you are creating <a href="/foo"/> is absolute, so how would you do relative? 🤔

[wmertens]

We could do relative paths with #146

I implemented my other idea in mhevery/qwik-i18n#11

[gioboa]

We moved this issue to qwik-evolution repo to create a RFC discussion for this.
Here is our Qwik RFC process thanks.

[wmertens]

See #146 for the discussion on makePath, but I think the approach with just translating the URL using https://github.com/wmertens/compiled-i18n or $localize is fine (and Misko merged the PR implementing it), so I'll close this.