Tom Collins writes:

> Having a compile-time option for default language is an excellent idea, 
> but I doubt many browsers will have language preferences that don't 
> result in at least ONE match with available languages.

And that is precisely the problem.  As whoever it was said, many people
do not have a clue how to make it match anything other than the default
MS give it, which is English.  So rather than him explaining to each
user how to make it prefer Spanish or German or whatever, he wants a
drop-down in qmailadmin.  But if they don't select anything, they will
get English instructions about how to use the drop-down to select their
preferred language, and they may not understand.  Much better is if he
can make qmailadmin default to using a language other than English.
And while that can be fiddled at present by replacing the en language
file, having default as a soft link to a language file chosen at
configure time would be cleaner.
 
> In a recent message, someone posted about another web interface similar 
> to QmailAdmin.  I liked their implementation -- a popup that's already 
> set to the default based on browser settings.

Which is reasonable enough.  But if you're a Spanish ISP catering
to people in Spain, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, etc., then you might prefer
qmailadmin to display instructions in Spanish whatever their
browser settings.  Hmmmm, maybe you need a 'default' soft link
and an 'override' soft link.  If override is present then until
the user selects a language from the drop-down the instructions are
in that language.  If override is not present then the browser preference
is used.  If there is no matching browser preference then default is
used.  If default is not there then en is used.  Oh, but thinking about
it, it would be nice to able to set override and default on a per-
domain basis.

Catering to people too stupid to configure their browser gets very
painful when you provide domains to people in several different countries.
:(

> The new value will be used for the session, and could even 
> be saved in a cookie on the user's machine.

Surely it's better to save it as a user preference.  After all, one of
the points of a web interface is that you are not tied to using a
single computer.

-- 
Paul Allen
Softflare Support


Reply via email to