Re: i18n preferences (was: Estonian Translation)

From: "Justin Schmidt" <[email protected]>
> Given that the internationalization efforts are going so well, and LW 4.9 
> lockdown will be easing soon, I was hoping to start some brainstorming for 
> improving two potential issues with our current 'change language' 
> workflow:
>  (1)  There's a nasty scaling problem if there are too many languages in 
> the menu.
>  (2)  If people accidentally choose a language they cannot understand, 
> frequently they don't know how to find their language again.
>
> I know Philippe was at least considering working on a solution to (1) 
> using a language chooser window.  This seems like it has a lot of 
> potential.

I forgot to say that there's another option I was working on;
look at the "translators.html" document: it shows languages along with the 
countries where they are used. This list is still incomplete, but it should 
allow helping mapping languages to countries or continental regions. such a 
map could be used by users by allowing them to select not only the language 
but also the country for their prefered locale.

This would have a benefit: the country or continental region could be used 
in connection preferences, so that users will more likely find the medias 
they prefer in their region, instead of just in their language. For example 
music or video preference is not bound by language, and the music or cinema 
charts are often bound to geographical areas rather than languages.

Knowing that, we could use this country selection more easily than with 
IP-based geolocalisation (which is not easy to administrate as it is not 
very accurate with unreliable databases that must be updated constantly and 
it changes over time without notice, or large ISPs like AOL are 
sharing/moving their allocated IP addresses across their worldwide network).

The idea is also that users may want to select a country which is not their 
current location, but simply a preference for contents. (forcing users to 
use their current IP location is too much intrusive for user privacy).

So when a user would select a country, they would be offered the choice to 
prefer connections by region or by language. The current system is only 
bound to a precise language and does not work well for non major languages 
where available content is too rare (also look at French for example, where 
Canadian users will see too many European contents from France, but will not 
see enough Canadian English contents...)

Another benefit of setting a regional connection preference is that 
connections will be easier and faster as these prefered connections will 
avoid most slow and costly intercontinental connections. This will globally 
optimize the network for speed, without cutting completely the 
interconnections across continents.

To allow such a change in connection preferences, we will need to update the 
way the servents are exchanging locale information: it should not send only 
the language, but also the country selection, and the receiving agent will 
make its own decision based on its local user preference settings.

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