Re: Localized Pages

[Michel Martens <michel expocentro com>]

On 2000.11.22 12:53:28 -0300 Christian Rose wrote:
> 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.

The best way to get around this is to provide simple links to pages in
other languages. The user that goes to www.gnome.org won't be surprised if
he/she finds that all the texts are written in english.

Here goes the voice of experience: I speak spanish, english and a little
bit of french. I lived in France for one year, and I hated when many sites
showed everything in french.

Clean text links. A splash screen showing a menu of languages is evil.

Michel Martens