[Sigia-l] Multiple languages on a single web page

[Andrew McNaughton]

On Tue, 20 Aug 2002, Chiara Fox wrote:

> Hello Dianne-
>
> The idea of having language preferences and having the
> site automatically serve up the page in a preferred
> language is something we are thinking about.
>
> Are the browser-based language preferences widely used
> though? Is it something that is unique to IE? We need
> to support a variety of browsers on different
> platforms.

Are your users going to have different language preferences in different
contexts?  Taking a trip to the preferences and another to change them
back is just too cumbersome.

> I also worry that not many users know to adjust that setting. Of course,
> it may be common knowledge outside the US. Any insights from collegues
> not based in the US?

This will vary a lot depending what languages are involved.  You certainly
don't get a lot of people using this mechanism to indicate a preference
for Maori text.

There's a parallel issue with character encodings to be aware of.  It's a
bit of a technical nightmare.




> -Chiara
>
> --- diannes at dbfields.com wrote:
> > It occurs to me that one way out of this (for
> > dynamically generated pages anyway) is to use
> > language detection and to append a parenthetic note
> > to link text for pages that are only available in
> > languages *not* listed in
> > the user's browser preferences: i.e. '<a
> > href="...">Page title (in Swedish)</a>'
> > if the request lists the user's language preferences
> > as en-US,fr,de.
>
> =====
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