- From: Leif Halvard Silli <lhs@malform.no>
- Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 01:10:18 +0200
- To: Dave Singer <singer@apple.com>
- CC: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>, W3C WAI-XTECH <wai-xtech@w3.org>, W3C Style List <www-style@w3.org>
Dave Singer 2008-09-10 00.30: > At 11:17 +0300 4/09/08, Henri Sivonen wrote: >> On Sep 4, 2008, at 01:13, Dave Singer wrote: >> More to the point even, automatic mechanisms for language selection >> are known to be *practically pointless* to engineer, because we >> already know from HTTP Content-Negotiation that users don't bother to >> configure it. > > We've had some success with QuickTime and alternate language, on occasion. I wonder when it begins to be pointless? Our cable TV set-top box was delivered at the door being preprogrammed to prefer subtitling in Norwegian. And that works. So it should be a success! Likewise, browsers nowaways - probably with the exception of Firefox - tend to pick their preferred language setting from the OS. Which works as well. So it should be a success? (Well, I have some complaints about how Safari forces me to change the language preference of my entire OS if I want to tell it to prefer a certain language - but OK.) There is a problem when we go in to the finer granularty of things - is that why it should be pointless? Users often do not regulate the default language preference settings. And it also isn't particulary easy to select language preferences in a web browser. (Why is it not provided as a menu beside the Encoding selection preferences e.g.?) Plus that browsers are choke full of cookies that override the language prefernces anyhow. Etc. So I would not measure the success in the number of times users change their language preferences. -- leif halvard silli
Received on Tuesday, 9 September 2008 23:11:18 UTC