- From: Martin J. Dürst <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>
- Date: Thu, 28 Aug 1997 14:51:07 +0200 (MET DST)
- To: Yaron Goland <yarong@microsoft.com>
- cc: "'Judith Slein'" <slein@wrc.xerox.com>, w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
On Wed, 27 Aug 1997, Yaron Goland wrote: > Furthermore Martin, you make some very sweeping statements Agreed, I was a bit to the sweeping side. But it has provoked a lot of interesting reactions, it seems. > What is a "serious" web site? For examlpes, start with http://www.100hot.com/home.chtml > Which of these "serious" web sites use variants? A lot of them use language variants. Some typical US-only sites, like usatoday, won't. But most of them will do some other kind of configuration/version management, for example to account for browser peculiarities and bugs :-(. Every time Microsoft or Netscape get something wrong, serious sites have to account for it. They can't afford things not to work on the mainstream browsers. And this also shows that Accept headers are not the only thing that variants are based upon. User-Agent is probably much more important :-(. > What percentage > of all web sites are "serious" and use variants? For the 100 listed at http://www.100hot.com/home.chtml, I would be surprised if there was any that didn't. If you know of one, please let me know. Not that many of them already recognize accept headers, but as said above, that's not necessary for serving variants. > What commercial systems > deploy with built in support for variant handling? I don't know many commercial web servers. But definitely DynaWeb or what the server from INSO is called does, and goes to extremely great detail. Also, Apache deploys with built in support for variant handling. > How many people use those systems? More and more. They haven't been around for such a long time, and it takes time for people to realize that these things are supported, and to learn how to use them. > How many web sites use variants as opposed to > having a "choose English here" tag? See above. And the "choose English here" tag is not a definite indication that server-side variant support is not used. Both are necessary in a transitory phase. > How many web sites handle primarily > language variants by having an initial detection of the accept-language > tag and then redirect the person to an entire site in a single language? Quite a few. In some cases, especially for commercial sites that target people from different language regions in different ways, and therefore may have parts of their web sites that are completely unrelated for two languages, this makes a lot of sense. But there are many cases where very close parallelism is desired. These include administrations in countries with multiple languages (have a look e.g. at http://www.admin.ch/), the European Commission, other supranational organizations, but also corporations for their internal guidelines and documents. Even for Microsoft, where a lot of marketing is very well targeted at the local public, I expect big parts of websites (more straightforward technical stuff) to exhibit quite a high degree of parallelism. And with the ever-increasing streamlining of internationalization into the overall software development process, the reduction of local or regional versions of software, and the world-wide coordination of launching dates, this parallelism will increase rather than decrease. Of course, every company or administration and their web authoring team is free to choose whether they want to use the mechanisms provided in HTTP, or whether they want to create something of their own. But an authoring protocol that forces everybody to create something of their own where the base protocol has a well-defined mechanism is not really something I would call a productivity tool. Regards, Martin.
Received on Thursday, 28 August 1997 08:52:56 UTC