[i18n][design] Interpret absolute paths as locale specific

[chalin]

Design l10n proposal

In summary, I’d like to propose that “absolute” link paths like /some-path be interpreted relative to the current localization site root, whether it is the default localization or not. So, it will be otel.io/some-path for en pages and otel.io/xx/some-path for non-en pages with language code xx.

Here’s why…

With fallback pages in place, each localization is like its own (sub) site — and in fact, Hugo treats each localization as a full Site object.

For the default localization (which is en), link paths like /some-path implicitly refer to pages under content/en. If an English page wants to refer to say, a ja page, then the link path would be written as /ja/some-path.

Currently, localization authors for language xx who translate an English page, need to remember to change all paths of the form /some-path to /xx/some-path, otherwise they’ll be linking out to en pages. That is a burden on writers and maintainers.
I’d like to put a link render hook in place so that /some-path refers to the localization-specific version of the page, whether it is en or not. If a non-en localization wants to explicitly refer to an en page, they’d use /en/some-path as a path.

How does that sound?

This was originally posted on Slack at https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/C06EDFPQ5EH/p1718358356363719.

@theletterf and @svrnm gave a thumbs up