Brandon Allbery wrote: >I, for one, *have* tried to understand --- and the best I can come up >with is what they come up with. Which makes this discussion a bit >self-referential, not to mention making your "when someone tries to >understand" sound just a touch out of place. Would you mind greatly >if I asked you to explain yourself a bit better, given that multiple >people are *not* getting whatever point you're trying to make?
Well, ok. I apologize for letting my frustration show. This all started when Derek Balling suggested a gear icon was a better way to determine in which language a viewer wants to see a web page. I responded that, IMO, an even better solution would be to have your browser send a language preference variable as part of the HTTP dialog and for the web site to honor that preference. I presume such a variable might arrive as an environment variable at the web server, similar to the way the user-agent string arrives today. Benjamin then interpreted my idea to mean that a web site would have to be prepared for any possible language selection. That was not my meaning as I explained. A site only available in one language would just ignore the preference variable. A site available in the requested language would serve that version. A site with multiple languages available but not the one requested would serve its default version. If a site wanted to provide a gear or a flag or a word button for those visitors whose browser wasn't yet capable of sending the new preference variable, I don't care. (But I would think it proper to suppress such a button if the preference variable was set.) Steven then complained that, because I criticized the variations in the appearance of the gear icon, I must have meant that a web site should retain a language selection button using words. I really don't see where that idea originated. While I personally don't care for icons, the idea I'm presenting is neutral on that subject. It's just a more efficient and transparent way to serve the desired page version without a viewer having to do anything most of the time. -- Dave Close, Compata, Irvine CA "If I seem unduly clear to you, [email protected], +1 714 434 7359 you must have misunderstood [email protected] what I said." -- Alan Greenspan _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
