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Accept my accept-language

blog.choibean.com

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Re: Accept my accept-language

#61

Post by kalleboo »

Udo wrote: post #25

Pretty much every major site will completely ignore not only your browser's language settings but also onsite user account settings and other desperate attempts at selecting the language. The only thing that matters is your IP address. For example, accessing Google: my browser is set to accept English only. I'm entering the English URL. In my account settings I periodically reset everything I can find to English (set…

And don't forget that no matter what your IP, no matter what your language setting, no matter what country you have set, Google Maps will still default you to showing a view of the continental United States. You're in Tokyo, searching for Yokohama? Here's Yokohama Sushi in downtown Los Angeles. For a while, the new web Google Maps redesign even removed the HTML5 Location API "my position" button. It's back now, but it should be defaulting to showing your location, like the mobile apps do.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#62

Post by yepguy »

delroth wrote: post #54
crazygringo wrote: post #50

Language choices are a mess. There can easily (and often) be conflicting data based on: - accept-language header - URL that includes language/region codes as a subdomain or part of the path - language preferences set in a cookie or account - IP region detection In the end, any website is trying to provide the right language most often for their users, and there are no easy answers. When I access webmail from an Inter…

What we've done for dolphin-emu.org: * In all cases, a fairly visible language picker is displayed at the top of the page, with internationalized language names. * If someone goes to a language-specific subdomain (fr.dolphin-emu.org, cy.dolphin-emu.org, ast.dolphin-emu.org, ...), they get this version. * If someone goes to the generic/english dolphin-emu.org, the system checks whether the user has a "nocr" cookie. If…

This seems like a pretty good solution, except that your language picker includes country flags, which don't make sense for many users.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#63

Post by delroth »

yepguy wrote: post #62
delroth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we've done for dolphin-emu.org: * In all cases, a fairly visible language picker is displayed at the top of the page, with internationalized language names. * If someone goes to a language-specific subdomain (fr.dolphin-emu.org, cy.dolphin-emu.org, ast.dolphin-emu.org, ...), they get this version. * If someone goes to the generic/english dolphin-emu.org, the system checks whether the user has a "nocr" cookie. If…

This seems like a pretty good solution, except that your language picker includes country flags, which don't make sense for many users.

They do make sense for many users, and they are the closest you can find to a proper graphical representation of languages. When I add a language that I know to be official in several countries, I look at my analytics to see where most users come from and use the flag from their country. I can't remember a time where it did not also match the country with the most speakers.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#64

Post by ketralnis »

yepguy wrote: post #62
delroth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we've done for dolphin-emu.org: * In all cases, a fairly visible language picker is displayed at the top of the page, with internationalized language names. * If someone goes to a language-specific subdomain (fr.dolphin-emu.org, cy.dolphin-emu.org, ast.dolphin-emu.org, ...), they get this version. * If someone goes to the generic/english dolphin-emu.org, the system checks whether the user has a "nocr" cookie. If…

This seems like a pretty good solution, except that your language picker includes country flags, which don't make sense for many users.

Unless you have different pricing per country or something orthogonal to language, I'm sure than a speaker of Canadian French can figure out that clicking the French flag may help them understand this page better. It's a common enough idiom on the web.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#65

Post by derefr »

kalleboo wrote: post #61
Udo wrote: post #25

Pretty much every major site will completely ignore not only your browser's language settings but also onsite user account settings and other desperate attempts at selecting the language. The only thing that matters is your IP address. For example, accessing Google: my browser is set to accept English only. I'm entering the English URL. In my account settings I periodically reset everything I can find to English (set…

And don't forget that no matter what your IP, no matter what your language setting, no matter what country you have set, Google Maps will still default you to showing a view of the continental United States. You're in Tokyo, searching for Yokohama? Here's Yokohama Sushi in downtown Los Angeles. For a while, the new web Google Maps redesign even removed the HTML5 Location API "my position" button. It's back now, but i…

The web version is actually localized by domain.

http://maps.google.com is the US-local Google Maps; http://maps.google.ca defaults to Canada; http://maps.google.co.jp sends you to Japan; etc.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#66

Post by [deleted] »

kalleboo wrote: post #61
Udo wrote: post #25

Pretty much every major site will completely ignore not only your browser's language settings but also onsite user account settings and other desperate attempts at selecting the language. The only thing that matters is your IP address. For example, accessing Google: my browser is set to accept English only. I'm entering the English URL. In my account settings I periodically reset everything I can find to English (set…

And don't forget that no matter what your IP, no matter what your language setting, no matter what country you have set, Google Maps will still default you to showing a view of the continental United States. You're in Tokyo, searching for Yokohama? Here's Yokohama Sushi in downtown Los Angeles. For a while, the new web Google Maps redesign even removed the HTML5 Location API "my position" button. It's back now, but i…

[deleted]

Re: Accept my accept-language

#67

Post by _delirium »

derefr wrote: post #65
kalleboo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And don't forget that no matter what your IP, no matter what your language setting, no matter what country you have set, Google Maps will still default you to showing a view of the continental United States. You're in Tokyo, searching for Yokohama? Here's Yokohama Sushi in downtown Los Angeles. For a while, the new web Google Maps redesign even removed the HTML5 Location API "my position" button. It's back now, but i…

The web version is actually localized by domain. http://maps.google.com is the US-local Google Maps; http://maps.google.ca defaults to Canada; http://maps.google.co.jp sends you to Japan; etc.

Huh, I didn't know that. But why geoIP-based redirects on some sites and not others? google.com redirects me to google.dk, and even blogspot.com redirects me to blogspot.dk, but maps.google.com doesn't take me to maps.google.dk.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#68

Post by yepguy »

delroth wrote: post #63
yepguy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a pretty good solution, except that your language picker includes country flags, which don't make sense for many users.

They do make sense for many users, and they are the closest you can find to a proper graphical representation of languages. When I add a language that I know to be official in several countries, I look at my analytics to see where most users come from and use the flag from their country. I can't remember a time where it did not also match the country with the most speakers.

It's a common enough practice that most people usually know what it means, but there's a reason you don't see flags on Wikipedia, Facebook, or Youtube. Languages are spoken in many countries, and countries are multilingual. There are quite a few articles around the web on this topic, but that's basically what they boil down to: languages are not countries. Some users may be confused or offended that their flag is not represented.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#69

Post by _delirium »

ketralnis wrote: post #64
yepguy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a pretty good solution, except that your language picker includes country flags, which don't make sense for many users.

Unless you have different pricing per country or something orthogonal to language, I'm sure than a speaker of Canadian French can figure out that clicking the French flag may help them understand this page better. It's a common enough idiom on the web.

I think in the case of more than one country per language, you're right, just picking a big and/or well-known country as "representative" is fine: French flag for French, US or UK flag for English, German flag for German.

The bigger problem is the other situation, of more than one language per country. India has ~13 languages with >10m native speakers, and using the Indian flag for all of them would be pretty confusing. You could pick state flags (e.g. the flag of Gujarat to represent Gujarati), but that can be a politically tricky issue. In some cases choosing a representative flag for a language has even stronger political overtones, like using the flag of the Kurdistan independence movement to represent the Kurdish language. Plus, it's not always that clear which flag to pick, and user recognition may not be as high as in the French-flag-for-French case.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#70

Post by derefr »

_delirium wrote: post #67
derefr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web version is actually localized by domain. http://maps.google.com is the US-local Google Maps; http://maps.google.ca defaults to Canada; http://maps.google.co.jp sends you to Japan; etc.

Huh, I didn't know that. But why geoIP-based redirects on some sites and not others? google.com redirects me to google.dk, and even blogspot.com redirects me to blogspot.dk, but maps.google.com doesn't take me to maps.google.dk.

I believe the logic was that "google.com" always does the redirect, because people tend to type google.com manually into their address bar a lot. Google has never bothered to set up any other redirects itself.

Other services that Google has acquired, though (e.g. Blogger, Youtube, etc.) may have come pre-set-up with redirection logic, and Google has mostly left that untouched.

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