"As noted before, it will minimize the other options. If Dutch is featured prominently because it is set as the auto-accept language, somebody is less likely to notice that W. Frisian, Limburgish, Afrikaans, etc. are also available.
As Ant noted in another thread on the same topic (really, this is getting out of hand), the French reporters who didn't know that fr: existed... this would be similar, and potentially millions of users could be inconvenienced by it. Some Wikipedias link prominently (or at least somewhat prominently) to other languages spoken in the same region: Afrikaans links to other South African languages, Hindi links to other Indian languages, Chinese links to the other languages of China, etc. But some languages, for example English, cannot afford this because there are just too many languages (English has Inuktitut, French, Spanish, Navajo, Maori, Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Cornish, Chinese, Malay, Hebrew, Yiddish, Afrikaans, and plenty of other languages).
Mark"
Thus, if a man whose first language is Frisian sees:
N E D E R L A N D S
(Arabiyy) Afrikaans (B'lgarskij) (Belaruski) (Bam'la) Català Corsu Czestina Dansk Deutsch English Faroese Français Frysk ('elliniká) ...
you can see how much more likely they will be to end up at the Nederlands Wikipedia even if they would rather've gone to fy.wikipedia - one is shoved up in their face, the other one is further down the list and chances are they won't even know it exists. The same is true for anybody with English set as their browser language but who prefers another language (many people in India, Pakistan...), or any other language which has a similar situation.
Mark
On 10 Jan 2005 22:02:00 +0100, Till Westermayer till@tillwe.de wrote:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .
Hi Mark,
Again, any browser-setting based redirect or even not a redirect but a simple "your language: xxx" notice suffers from problems I have already enumerated.
What is the problem with an "your language: German" according to my browser settings and the possiblity for me to select "English", "Alemmanisch" or even "Tagalog" in the list below? I don't understand why this new proposal -- which is helpful in prominently showing a language the user is understanding and using according to his/her browser settings, but let's them decide if they want to use this or another -- is dangerous. Looks to me more like a "oh, so no one will edit the small languages anymore" issue.
Till
Mark
On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 17:03:53 +0100 (MET), Alfio Puglisi puglisi@arcetri.astro.it wrote:
Please now have a look at
http://www.tommasoconforti.com/portal3.php
(note the "3"). Only works with English, German, French and Italian browser settings, to save on typing. Any errors are Google translation fault:-))
This version translates all the top banner and adds "Go" box with text in your language, and a drop-down selection of the available languages, with yours selected first. Try changing your browser from en: to fr: or it:.
If you change the language preference and reload, your browser might retain the drop-down box selection (Firefox does), so you won't see the new one automatically selected. In that case, try clearing your cache (Firefox has a special cache for form data that needs to be cleared).
Strings are hard-coded inside the script. Moving them to an external configuration file is not a problem.
Alfio
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