Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 12/27/05 22:23

Adrienne Boswell <arbpen2003@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> In addition to what others have said, if you are going to make a drop
> down list of countries, and your users are usually in a specific country
> (ie American Loyalty Card), then have that country as the first choice.

While that may sound natural, and may actually help at times, it will also
mislead people. If you take a quick look at a dropped-down menu, you probably
see that it's in alphabetic order, which is a natural expectation anyway.
Then you might be looking for United States somewhere between the Ukraine and
Uruguay, in vain.

> You can also do some best guessing looking at the HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE.

That would be foolish, really.

> That's what Google does in determining which interface to serve.

Google is known for its obscure, undocumented, and harmful trickery in
choosing the interface language according to various data.

> For instance, if your accept language is French, Google will serve pages in
> French. Mind you, it's definately not fool proof.

If only it did so (consistently), things would be better. The Accept-Language
header (that's it's name; the CGI interface transmogrifies it into
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE) is meant exactly for that: for expressing the user's
linguistic preferences, for use when the server has the same content
available in two or more languages. Confusing it with country selection is
the start of infinite confusion and frustration. The question was about
country selection.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

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