Language Negotiation
A former client's new website is back up. The one we did for them had a nice virtual tour of the place, movie clips of shows, photos of the excellent bands and singers who were just natural performers, a user-updatable "latest news" system in three languages, a working enquiry form, and automatic language negotiation. The new site has none of these neat features.
The colour scheme of the old site is actually quite similar to the new site. Whether the design of the new site is better is highly arguable. We are still on good terms with this former client. The new site couldn't be free, and would certainly cost more than paying us to migrate the old site to the new server/ISP of their choice.
I don't understand it. Pay-more-get-less-go-back-to-square-one. Maybe the client want to take the simplistic approach?
Enough whining about former clients. It's language negotiation that I want to write about.
Language negotiation on Apache is hard to use. Different browsers also have slightly different ways to tell the webserver about what languages they understand. It just doesn't work very well as the RFCs suggested. However, we figured out a straightforward way to do it, so with the old club-bboss site, a Japanese browser would see the Japanese version of the site, an English browser would see the English version, and a Chinese browser would see the Chinese version, all automagically without the user needing to select the version (extra clicks are bad for usability.) There were of course links to the other versions on the web pages for the user to overrid and choose another language. This is a unique feature that we are quite proud of.
Ken recently did this. His initial plan was to do automagic language negotiation. Ridley insisted that he wanted the tunnel page as it is now, and forces the visitors to do that extra click to choose the language of the site. Maybe Ridley is trying to convey the good message: P.E. is good for you.
I think language negotiation is a good thing(TM). Clients are not convinced. Hmm...
12:32:12 PM 
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