Multilingual site development: Part I language detection

The writing of this post has been on my back-burner for months now. In fact, ever since the I re-implemented Anna’s comic’s publishing system. I was finally kicked into documenting what I did by Asterisk’s latest post. I’ll probably write a series of entries dealing with the development of multilingual sites. I won’t concentrate on the usability issues that are inherent as there is already much documentation and discussion on such matters.

These posts will be much more technical and dig into how we can possibly implement multi-lingual sites that work without splash-pages (select your language before proceeding) or users ending up on pages in gobbly-gook (from their perspective) and hunting for a link to switch languages with. So, on with the techical details and nit-picking.

Intelligent user interfaces

With a background of studying software agents and user interfaces, I’ve always tried to come to grips with the conflicting views of user needs that the two fields have. Some thoughts on the matter.

I’ve fiddled around with software agents and usability for quite some time during my studies. Because of my work I haven’t lately had time to follow the new developments in both fields, but there are a few quotes I’d like to share and discuss the conflict that the two fields have in their perception of user needs. Disclaimer: I don’t think that the conflict is as pronounced as I make it to be and none of the quotes presented have been tied together anywhere else but in my mind.