Posted by Adrienne Boswell on 12/28/05 08:53

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed "Jukka K. Korpela"
<jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> writing in
news:Xns9739E35EF4CF7jkorpelacstutfi@193.229.4.246:

> 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.

It is duplicated. In the case of the US, it is duplicated once. I would
not do that for a country that had a lot of choices, as was discussed
futher up in this thread.

>
>> 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.
>

You are absolutely correct. In fact, for a site I am working on, when it
goes international, I will be removing US as the first choice on the list.
But that won't be for some time, however, I'm making a note in my calendar
that I need to do this.

--
Adrienne Boswell
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
Please respond to the group so others can share

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