Re: Language

On Tue, 26 Oct 2004, Marek Mazurek wrote:

> It appears that since today I'm getting the CSS Validator page in Dutch.

It seems that thet added a Dutch version, using language negotiation
_only_. I think this has been reported as a problem earlier, when people
got the French version without really wanting that, and with no obvious
way to find the English one.

I think people behind this should quickly re-consider the design and add
explicit links to the other versions into each language version, using
link names that are understandable to people who only know the language of
the resource that the link points to. In fact, anyone designing a
multilingual site should do this _first_, and only then consider language
negotiation mechanisms. Although this should be pretty self-evident, I've
written some explicit arguments:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/multi/2.var

> Is there any way to change that?

Adding the links is surely possible and should not take more than a few
minutes.

What you and me can do is to check the language preferences in our
browser(s) so that they reflect our actual preferences. Of course, there
are obvious problems if you use a computer that you share with someone
else. But it's not a big issue, since language negotiation isn't used that
much yet, and most sites using it do it properly, with explicit links
available.

> I'm using Windows 2000 SP4 (US English), and the country is set to "United
> Kingdom".

That's mostly irrelevant. The odds are that the factory settings have
language preferences with English only (or some collection of
English in general, US English, and British English, in some order),
but apparently you have changed something there, or someone else (or even
something) has changed the preferences. Use
Tools/Internet Options/General/Languages

You can also use
http://www.cs.tut.fi/cgi-bin/run/~jkorpela/lang.cgi
to check the language preferences that your browser sends.

> Google and Hotmail do the same to me but at least they provide the use of a
> "forced" language.

Google uses its own mixture of technology and trickery. It doesn't do
these things properly either, but as you say, it at least gives us an
escape route when it guesses wrong.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Tuesday, 26 October 2004 05:50:39 UTC