- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2006 10:42:24 +0200 (EET)
- To: www-html@w3.org
On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Manuel Strehl wrote: > I think it's kind of a vicious circle. In a sense it is, but I think you missed the point in my message that you responded to (and quoted). Considering just the authoring side and the user side, it _is_ a vicious circle with no way out. The solution, if any, is in the software, in user agents. If you install the IE 7 beta preview, you will enter "once-only" page (you can actually return to it), which asks some relatively irrelevant questions before letting the user start browsing. Instead of asking the user questions that may well be asked later or can be omitted (by defaulting settings and letting users change them if they wish), browsers should ask _essential_ questions, such as preferred default font size (offering a set of reasonable alternatives) - and language preferences. As long as there is no move in that direction, language negotiation remains a specialty with marginal use. (And the hreflang attribute probably always remains useless. Personally, I use it sometimes - as a documentation for myself mostly. But it's actually worse than useless when it is incorrect. And the destination of a link _may_ change language - perhaps switching to a language-negotiated version - without notifying people who link to it.) -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Sunday, 5 February 2006 08:42:38 UTC