On Saturday 04 July 2009 13:35:35 Ian Clarke wrote: > On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 12:41 PM, Matthew > Toseland<toad at amphibian.dyndns.org> wrote: > > I agree it's annoying but pragmatically everyone knows 1) the flag of their > > country, and 2) the flag > > of the largest country speaking their language; it takes up least space > > this way. > > Hasn't anyone notices that almost no modern website has a manual > language selection mechanism these days? > > Why is this? Perhaps because they realized that web browsers report > the user's preferred languages to the web server in the HTTP > "Accept-Language" header, and therefore it is almost entirely > unnecessary to have a way for users to manually select language.
Which does not help you at all if you are accessing the site from a Russian webcafe and you speak French as well as Russian, and there is a French translation but no Russian translation. Or if you haven't told your browser about your second and third languages (most people don't). There was a link about this somewhere... http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-when-lang-neg | Question: When is it appropriate, or not, to use language negotiation? | Answer: ... | A slightly longer answer is: almost always, but not alone. | Language negotiation does not always work as intended; there are techniques to make up for the shortcomings; one should also provide for stickyness in navigation. | Shortcomings of language negotiation | Language negotiation is evidently a useful thing, but before implementing it across the board, it is important to understand its limits. To illustrate these, we will use the example of a site, www.example.be, that offers its content in Flemish, French and German, implements language negotiation and defaults to Flemish for all pages. Our visitor, Sylvia, will be Italian-speaking, but able to deal with German. Several situations may arise: |# Sylvia's browser is correctly configured, expressing preferences for Italian first, German second. Italian is not available at www.example.be, the pages are returned in German, the visitor is fairly happy, all is well. This is what language negotiation is for! |# Sylvia is a non-technical person who has never heard of HTTP language negotiation and has never felt a need to alter the settings of her browser. The latter is an Italian version which (correctly) defaults to expressing a preference for Italian. Hitting www.example.be, Italian is not available and the site-default Flemish is returned, even though German is available. Bad. |# Sylvia is not using her own browser, she's sitting in an Internet caf? in Moscow. The browser there was configured for (or defaulted to) Russian. She gets Flemish again. Bad. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 835 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20090704/441cbd61/attachment.pgp>
