Tom Collins writes:

> When we start the next development cycle, we're going to move all of 
> the HTML into the templates if possible.

Either you do it with the existing 099 type substitutions or you move
it into language/customized template directories.

> It shouldn't be hard to use existing strings from the language files 
> for the ALT tags.

You might need some new ones in some cases.  I'd have to check every
single one of them to be sure (as would you).  My guess is that you'd
need a few new ones (but I'm prepared to be surprised).

[language-specific image substitution]
> I wasn't aware that that existed.

It doesn't exist.  But there are hints that at one point it was under
consideration.  Even if it's only the login page that's affected,
the mailbox is a typically US one (and unknown in the UK) and other
languages may not have "E" as the universal prefix for Internet
mail.

> Should we just switch to graphics that don't include ANY text?

As long as you don't use any graphics for textual-related items and which
do not rely upon linguistic abbreviations or puns.  Few user interface
specifications require that degree of universality and of those that do
even fewer have a significant number of applications that meet it.  But
relying upon a rebus which only makes sense in English is a very bad idea.
The only way to ensure that other languages can have meaningful graphics
is to allow a graphic to be chosen based upon language.

BTW, My experience of graphics designers is that they want pretty graphical
buttons instead of <submit value="add new user"> because they don't
feel they've earned their money unless the look is different from
something you or I could do in seconds.  Graphics designers want to
customize.  Not a problem in my situation, because we enforce a uniform
look upon all our clients (muahahahaha).   But in some circumstances I
could see some people wanting to be able to customize the look and feel
for individual domains.

-- 
Paul Allen
Softflare Support


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