Re: Localized Pages

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Calum Benson wrote:

> > I was thinking that the solution being discussed was one based on the
> > user's language preferences in the browser, i.e. when the user goes to
> > www.gnome.org his language preferences are detected in his browser by
> > the site, and the pages automatically served in his preferred language.
>
> Just as an aside, we had a discussion about doing automatic langauge
> detection for websites on the ACM CHI-WEB mailing list a while back-- it
> turns out that most people don't like it for various reasons, and would
> rather pick their language themselves from the webpage.  
>
> I can probably post a pointer to the archived discussion, if anyone's
> interested...

I've read the entire thread now, thanks for the pointer.

I wouldn't say that "most" people don't like this. In my experience, it 
is only a relatively small group that purely detest their mother tongue 
being used instead of English in technical writing. But this group is 
often the loudest ;-)

These users that don't want information in their own language are also 
very rarely novice users -- so if www.gnome.org is at all aimed at 
novice users, it should include some language selection mechanism that 
is automatic, provides a "smart" default and is overridable if the user 
wants that. I think only the content-negotiation language selection as 
default and an optional language selection method on the page that 
overrides that (and with this info stored in a cookie) provides all this.



Christian