Tim: >> setting your language preferences (what can you read, what do you >> prefer, necessary for painless use of websites that do content >> negotiation) Steve Hill: > Should this not be a system wide setting rather than browser specific? It > isn't as if anyone would want their whole system to be in German, except > the browser which is set to French... Web browsing has additional language negotiation features, which the OS doesn't offer. On the OS you pick your language, and that's what you get. But with web browsing, you can give it a list of languages that you can read, and you can give weighting to it. e.g. You might prefer English, but also be able to read German and French. Likewise, the web server can have weighting for the languages. Their English might be perfect, but the German translation might be sub-optimal, so the weight them accordingly. A bit of maths to compare the weighting of the languages on both server and client, you should get the best choice for you, automatically. It doesn't always work, particularly as so many people simply do not configure their browsers, so websites often have manual overrides, or just don't bother with using content negotiation. But if some English language website serves you with a 406 error, and no content, because you're French but can actually read English, you only have yourself to blame. > I don't think the current situation of installing all languages for > all applications is a great one .... it is just a waste of disk space I tend to agree. Though supporting languages in the browser isn't the same thing as having every application use multi-lingual text in the program. The browser can show you pages in any language, while the menus, etc., will always stay in your language >> For instance, why would you want a website to disable your right-click >> menus? That's just dumb. > There are legitimate reasons in some cases - for example, Google Maps > replaces the right-click menu with a context menu for the map itself > rather than the standard browser context menu. Hmm, I wasn't aware that *they* did something useful with them. Typically, though, I'd find that if I allowed menus to be disabled, I'm unable to open links in background tabs, view source code, etc., thanks to web authoring paranoia and control freaks. > On the privacy side, I was disappointed to see the "Allow foreign cookies" > option disappear from the FireFox user interface when FireFox 2 came along > - you have to hack about in about:config to turn them off these days. I seem to recall that the option was less than successful at doing what you'd hope it would. It was possible to have third party cookies get through, even with that setting set. But my Firefox 3 does have an option about third-party cookies, and I didn't hack anything to put it into the config. These days, I allow first-party cookies, block third-party, and have the browser erase them on exit. I don't use sites that need personalisation across sessions. And I think third-party cookies only ever really get used for tracking people to build up a profile, no competent web author would use them for their own website to function. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
