Re: Localized Pages

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim helixcode com>]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2000 at 09:10:40PM +0100, Christian Rose wrote:
> Joakim Ziegler wrote:

>>> just stating this because i dont want the 'kiss system' to be associated
>>> with people NOT interested in localization.
 
>> I agree. It seems to me that a reasonable approach, from what I've seen,
>> would be the following:
 
>> Present the site in English, and have a menu to select the language to use.
>> Use the language header the browser sends to put that language on top of the
>> menu, where it's most easily accessible. That seems like a reasonable
>> tradeoff to me.

>> Anyone disagree?
 
> Even if the detected language setting should be presented as the 
> top-most choice in a drop down box on an otherwise English-by-default 
> page, I don't think this is the correct way. Most web developers know 
> that if you can't attract the visitor that wants information fast, and 
> convince him or her in so-and-so-many seconds that this is the page he 
> should read, he/she won't stay.

> This, I think, is also true for localization. If an international 
> visitor, who is not fluent with English, that wants quick information 
> about what GNOME is should be presented with an English default I don't 
> think that he would spend that much time to even figure out if it can be 
> set otherwise. It would just be "oh well, this is not the information 
> taht I wanted". That's why I think the default is so important.

> And then again, the language setting in your browser doesn't say "I want 
> all content in English by default, whatever I set this setting to". Its 
> message is "if I set this setting, this is the language that will be the 
> default to me". So if I set it to "Dutch", it means that I really want 
> pages to appear in Dutch. I think we should respect that.

There's an additional problem with atuomatic detection, in addition to the
ones people have already mentioned: Automatic detection is broken on certain
combinations of browsers, proxies and so on. For instance, with my IE5
installation, if I try to go to the Debian site and click on any of the
documentation links that are supposed to use auto-detection, I get the
document in Polish, despite the fact that my IE is set to English as the
preferred language. It might be the proxy I use, but I doubt it. Now, if I
get a site in Polish, I'm *very* lost, especially if autodetection is the
sole/main way to detect languages.

Hence, given the obvious problems with this, I think autodetection to display
a clearly visible menu choice, and English as a default, combined with
www.se.gnome.org, www.fr.gnome.org and so on set up as aliases that do the
right thing, so that people who want to specifically refer to one language
(such as a newspaper or magazine in that language) can do so easily, is the
best way to do this, if we want to avoid potentially fatal problems.

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - Helix Code web monkey - joakim helixcode com - Radagast IRC
      FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
            http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.helixcode.com/