RE: Revised gateway FAQ

Hi,

I have some comments on this FAQ.

1. I think it mixes up several different applications for a "pull down" which should be kept separate:

  - Selecting the language of the current content (i.e. "show me this site in French")
  - Selecting a different site or section of a site targeted to a different country audience (i.e. "show me the site for France")
  - Selecting formatting and other preferences, possibly as a combination of the above (i.e. "show me information on this site formatted using the French/France locale")

These are not the same application and the best practices here only apply (I think) to one of them (the middle one).

2. The word "locale" is used sloppily and without introduction. In fact, I think the first occurrence:

One 
of the more popular devices is a pull-down menu on the home page that 
includes links to the other locales.

Really refers to the other use of the word "locale", meaning something like a country site and not a software locale. The word locale, to the extent possible, should be expunged or very clearly handled, since the target audience is not other I18N-aware folks such as ourselves.

3. The phrase "silver bullet" is not a globally accessible metaphor. Depending on your culture you need to know either the Lone Ranger or all about werewolves, I suppose?

4. The question's phrasing is awkward:

What are the best practices for using a pull-down menu on my company's 
Web site to direct visitors to their country Web sites?

Might I suggest:

What are the best practices for using a pull-down menu to direct visitors to a country- or language-specific content (such as a country Web site)?

I think this makes more sense because not all websites belong to a company. Also "country Web sites" are not always what is being accessed.

5. I think the discussion of pull-down location should be more generalized. Perhaps something like: 

--
The right location of the site selection box depends on the design of the page and the relative importance of finding alternate language or country sites to the home page. Putting the drop down box in the upper right corner makes the selection prominent and easily located. Many sites place it in that location for this reason.
--

Location is a usage consideration that should be carefully considered as part of the design and making it a best practice to put it in such a prominent position ignores the considerations that might go into locating such an item. I think the discussion of not overly favoring the USA site is a good one.

6. The discussion of an icon is interesting. The example of a shopping cart is slightly bad: some companies localize this to a basket for certain locales precisely because the icon is *not* recognized.

7. Translate the menu options is nice. The example should probably mention a country though instead of a language. I think it is better to be consistent here: if you are finding a country site, then the country name should be featured. The problem here is mixing language selection and country selection.

8. I don't agree with including example shots of other folk's websites. I think we'd be better off mocking up examples, since commercial sites change design format.

9. The discussion of UTF-8 is good. You might also mention the use of entities to encode names into pages that are otherwise Latin-1 or legacy encoded.

10. You might want to add to this discussion:

Be aware that a Web user in the US, 
for example, may see empty boxes in place of the Japanese text while 
the user in Japan will see the text just fine.

And point out the need to include ASCII or English identifiers or use bilingual entries in the list. If the site is available in multiple languages it sometimes makes sense to make the drop down accessible to users in the current page language too. For example:

  日本 (Japan)
  USA
  France
  Deutschland (Germany)

Although RFC 3066 or ISO 3166 identifiers are sometimes used for this purpose, I would tend to caution against them because they are in many cases obscure to users.

11. You omitted the problematic discussion of list organization. This is actually an interesting topic and probably deserves its own FAQ. I had some issues with that text in the previous version, but would suggest that you consider revising and contributing on that topic separately in the future.

12. Going back to my first point, the difference between language, site content, and geo-location is an important one to this FAQ. The interplay between these three choices is a fundamental site implementation choice and our FAQ should make that clear. The use of flags for language identifiers and the use of language names for country identifiers are both, in my opinion, a bad choice for this application. It has to be clear why this is the case, though, by spelling out that these are actually different applications and what the difference is.

Hope these comments help.

Happy holidays,

Addison

Addison P. Phillips
Director, Globalization Architecture
http://www.webMethods.com

Chair, W3C Internationalization Working Group
http://www.w3.org/International

Internationalization is an architecture. 
It is not a feature.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-i18n-geo-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:public-i18n-geo-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of John Yunker
> Sent: 2004年12月22日 16:36
> To: GEO
> Subject: Revised gateway FAQ
> 
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Based on input from the call today, here is the revised text and image 
> attachments.
> 
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
>

Received on Friday, 24 December 2004 17:41:37 UTC