Re: Localized Pages

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim helixcode com>]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2000 at 06:52:55PM +0100, Christian Rose wrote:
> Joakim Ziegler wrote:

>> Sourceforge is in English to me, no matter what I do with IE's language
>> settings.
 
> I have had no problem with this in Mozilla and Netscape. I suspect your 
> problem in IE is because SourceForge expects a language code (like 
> "ll"), while what IE sends might be a full locale (like "ll-CC" where 
> "ll" is language code and "CC" is country code).
 
> However, this is trivial to fix. For most languages, we don't need a 
> particular country code (since we don't have specific translation for 
> that country, just for languages), so it's just a matter of stripping 
> the last country code part and only use language code. Problem solved. 
> Not a very advanced programming hack, and it has been done before.

People in a lot of very large countries would disagree with you. Like the
whole of Latin America (including Brazil), Canadian, Carribbean and African
French users, etc., etc. Not to mention the enormous number of English
variants used around the world.


>> 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.

> Actually, I think setting a cookie is only necessary if the user 
> switched language manually (then we know that he is not satisfied with 
> the detected language). Only then, we must explicitly remember his 
> choice. In all other cases the language detection obviously worked and 
> there is no need to set a cookie.

The cookie is also handy to set to avoid complex language detection code in
all pages.


>> It doesn't work.

> Yes it does. You have only provided *one* example where the results were 
> "fatal" (you got Polish when you wanted English on the debian.org page).
> This was with IE (if I remember correctly), and more importantly, 
> debian.org uses Apache for determing language. This is probably not at 
> all what we will do (it seems we will use PHP, and hence we can use our 
> own code for this) and I don't think that it is relevant since 
> SourceForge, which uses a PHP solution, doesn't give you a Polish page. 
> So that problem was specific to the Debian solution, and hardly relevant 
> to this.

> I think picking *one* case like this where it didn't work, a problem 
> with a specific browser and a specific language and where the problem 
> probably won't affect our solution to this, and on the same time 
> disregard that not respecting language settings generally will result in 
> a lot of people around the world, regardless of browser, won't be able 
> to understand the site, is a very strange way to prioritize things.

There are a couple of other reasons as well that I'd very much like the main
page to be in English no matter what. First of all, with the proposed
structure of translation (checkins lead to mails being sent out to
translators), the translations would likely trail behind the English pages by
up to several days. Since a lot of people (especially new visitors) are
likely to go to www.gnome.org as a result of press coverage, it's extremely
important that the default for new users is the most up to date edition.
Also, English is clearly the language it's easiest to do good Quality
Assurance of, since it's the language most people involved in GNOME speak.
Hence, the chance of the page looking unrepresentative because of erroneous
language, etc. is the smallest if we default to English.

 
>> 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.
 
> I disagree. The only thing that would make a user expect English when he 
> goes to microsoft.com is that he has been there before and it was in 
> English at that time. People, in my experience, go to .com, .net and 
> .org domains because they suspect these are the official sites, and they 
> do want to go to the official site, but not because of a particular 
> language preference.
 
> For example, .nu is very popular, it is the country code for the island 
> of Niuawi (sp?) but that doesn't make the content on the majority of .nu 
> domains in the language of Niuawi, or people expecting it that way.

I said "Unless the site is something specific to a certain country or
language", such as the domain name before .com being in the given language.
This is certainly the case with Norwegian dot-com sites (my home country) or
Mexican ones (my current country of residence).

The *general* rule for .com, .net and .org-sites that do not fall into this
group (including gnome.org), is for the site to be in English, much like all
the large sites in these domains are these days.

Also, I'm thoroughly familiar with the rules for domain registration in more
countries than I can shake a stick at, for various reasons. And the shame
that the .nu domain was sold on the open market, despite the clear intention
of all organizations involved in creating national TLDs is not an argument in
favour of anything, really.


>> Automatic language detection is not used by any large, successful commercial sites,
 
> Why does it have to be commercial to count as an example? SourceForge is 
> a large web site, but it isn't commercial, and localization obviously 
> works for them.

Ok, then. Large sites, successful sites. SourceForge is by no means large in
comparison to the examples I gave. No free software sites are, actually,
including Slashdot.


>> 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.

> The problem is that in some countries you can't get a domain in that TLD 
> even if you pay an enormous amount of money. You'll have to have a 
> company with that name registered in that country too before they will 
> even look at your domain name application. Microsoft, Yahoo!, Apple, 
> Adobe etc can afford setting up local companies, but I doubt the GNOME 
> project can.

> And microsoft.CC (CC=country code) still isn't intuitative to most 
> people, that's why they do an enormous amount of advertising on 
> microsoft.com to attract people to the local sites. A construct like 
> www.se.gnome.org is even less intuitative to someone just trying to 
> guess where the GNOME site is. That is why localization of the main site 
> is so important.

Notice that I haven't argued against localization of the main site. I think
we agree that this is important. We're currently arguing about how much
weight to give to the little supported (by browsers in general) and seemingly
(to me) error-prone mechanism of Accept-Language: HTTP headers.

Please do not erect a strawman and claim that I'm opposed to localization. I
find it very important, and I also find it very important that it's done in
the way that gives the least amount of surprise for the users, in accordance
with good usability principles.


>> 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.

> And how should this be more common than a person coming to gnome.org to 
> learn about GNOME, thinking "oh, this is only in English" and leave, 
> just because he didn't realize that GNOME isn't at all reserved to just 
> English, and that GNOME *is* availiable in his language by default, but 
> the web page isn't?

> You can reverse the scenario like this over an over; an English-speaking 
> user getting the wrong page because of a bug and thus loose interest in 
> using GNOME, or an international visitor getting a page in English, a 
> language that he doesn't understand well or not understand at all, and 
> thus loose interest in using GNOME, but I think the latter would be 
> *much* more common than the former scenario.
> The former is caused by a rare bug that only affects some of the 
> visitors and that is fixable, the latter is caused by a bad site design 
> for international visitors and will affect all international visitors.

The reason the scenario isn't reversible is that people generally, by
convention, expect there to be a language choice on sites that show up in
English. English-speakers generally *don't* expect to come to non-English
sites in the .com, .org and .net TLDs and have to look for a language choice,
and as such, they're much more likely to leave.

Yes, English users are spoiled, and expect sites to show up in English much
more than other language users are and do. This is a sad fact, with
historical, cultural and political reasons. But it's still a fact. We can't
change that fact, so we should engineer with it in mind.

Would you mind trimming your replies down a little? I've tried to do so here,
but it's difficult to distill your thoughts, for me, and frankly this thread
is getting so long that it's hard for me to find the time to reply to it, and
it's certainly a nuisance for other listmembers as well.

-- 
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/