On 2011-05-31 at 23:59 -0700, Dave Close wrote: > I > responded that, IMO, an even better solution would be to have your > browser send a language preference variable as part of the HTTP dialog > and for the web site to honor that preference. I presume such a > variable might arrive as an environment variable at the web server, > similar to the way the user-agent string arrives today.
Oh, I got that interpretation but thought you were either being sarcastic or grumpy, but it looks like instead you're proposing this as a new idea. Web-browsers *do* support this and have since the 90s, you can find the language preference inside most browsers somewhere, except where it's delegated to the OS level controls. Because it mostly has not been delegated and most users don't know how to configure their browsers, the signal has proven to be worse than useless, with many people being presented with en-US. Accept-Language: en-GB,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.6 Big web-providers use things like geo-location of IP addresses because flawed as that is, it still manages to get better results than relying on the browser's language preference list. *If* the Accept-Language: header contains something other than English as the first language, then that's a good hint; mind, just having Dutch in there in last place has gotten me Dutch content on some sites, so clearly some web-developers feel that most users can manage to get their language into the list but not order the list. This sucks for English-speakers who travel, but since your settings can't be told apart from defaults, it'll be treated as "no signal". Perhaps explicitly adding en-US above en would help, or *something* to change from the browser defaults? But hey, there has to be _some_ downside to natively speaking the common language of the Internet. :) There are many signals for language to use; geolocation, Accept-Language, looking at the Referer and search-terms or variant web-sites therein. Nothing beats having the user explicitly set a value, preferably tied to an account which they sign into, but failing that in a stored cookie. So major websites will use a set of heuristics to choose the language to present by default until told otherwise, and you *still* have an issue with how to present to users the button associated with the concept of "hey, here's where you tell us we got it wrong!" Words often fail to be understandable, though sometimes I just have luck clicking random things in the top-right, or shoving into Google Translate and noticing a language option. Some use national flags, with nationality as an approximation to language. Some use gears, to cover "all settings are here". Sucky, but I've not seen a better iconography for settings and at least the concept meme of "gear is preferences" has infected enough of the world's computer-using population to be more usable than some new iconography. You only need to have it explained a couple of times before it sinks in. -Phil _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
