Re: Localized Pages

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim helixcode com>]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2000 at 03:35:41PM +0100, Christian Rose wrote:
> Joakim Ziegler wrote:

>> No, Google seems to work fine. Debian fails consistently, though. It's hard
>> to say what exactly is the reason for this.
 
> Could you try automatic language detection with SourceForge 
> (http://www.sourceforge.net)? SourceForge uses language preference 
> detection based on PHP, roughly the same solution that was discussed 
> here. And yes, SourceForge does this by default.

Sourceforge is in English to me, no matter what I do with IE's language
settings.


> However, my initial suggestion was that the www.xx.gnome.org fall back 
> to a pre-defined language (most likely one of the languages for that 
> "country") only if no language preference could be detected. No matter 
> what scenario, a language menu should be shown to override the results.

Yes, within a given country, we can fall back to either the most common
language in that country, or the language the browser asks for, if it's one
of the languages spoken in that country.

At this point, it seems like our language detection algorithm is getting
complex, but it's really not. Also, it only needs to be done once, since we
should use a cookie to set the preference.


>> So, comments to this scheme I'm suggesting, where www.gnome.org is always in
>> English by default, but has a menu to select other languages, where the
>> detected language is the default choice, and then uses a cookie to store the
>> language preferences, and www.xx.gnome.org are all localized sites that may
>> or may not be hosted in the actual country?

> I still think that it should respect the language setting in the browser 
> by default. If it is ok for SourceForge, then why not for the GNOME web 
> site? I think you should try SourceForges language detection and see if 
> it works for you. If it does, your problem was with the debian.org 
> implementation of language detection (debian.org uses Apache for 
> language detection I think), and I don't see a good technical reason at 
> all not to use language detection by default on the gnome pages to 
> server content in the detected language.

It doesn't work. However, it fails for me in a different way than Debian.org
(I always get English). It seems to me that language detection is error-prone
and badly supported. On the other hand, people *expect* to get sites in
English when they go to a site with a generic TLD, such as .org, unless the
site is something specific to a certain country or language. Automatic
language detection is not used by any large, successful commercial sites,
such as Yahoo!, Apple, Microsoft, etc., they all rely on subsites (or sites
under the relevant TLDs, which we can also do if someone wants to pay the
registration), and that doesn't seem to scare away any users.

On the other hand, presenting a page in Polish or whatever when people expect
English *is* a potentially fatal error, because people aren't used to Polish
being the standard language, and as such are much more prone to thinking "Oh,
this is a Polish project, it has nothing to do with me", and leave forever.

-- 
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/