J. O'Conner

I met Bill Hall sometime in 1993 or 1994 when we both worked at Novell. He was already a well-known software engineer, consultant, and internationalization guru. As a recently minted college graduate, I adopted Bill as my mentor. Like many mentors, Bill probably never knew this. And yet, he mentored me for more than 16 years in this globalization industry. He is the one, the only one, that I thought knew all there is to know.

Bill Hall could laugh until tears came to his eyes, and he could look at you and freeze a moment with you as if you were the only person in the world that mattered. Later in his life, his eyes would water for no good reason, except that maybe he was just getting older, and allergies or maybe just life itself had squeezed most of Bill out.

When Bill wasn’t talking about internationalization or piloting, he always spoke of his wife and children. I met his wife Ewa and one of his children, Kasia. They and my own wife toured around Tokyo one year long ago while Bill and I spoke at a conference or just happened to be in Tokyo together. I suppose the event doesn’t really matter; it was a long time ago. Kasia must be a junior or senior in college now….wow, time flies.

Just today, I received an email from Kasia, a personal email telling me that her father had died. I’ve since discovered that many others in the internationalization and globalization industry have received a similar but different email or notification from Kasia. At least a dozen other people that I know received those personal emails that said something that only Bill and you would know, something that Bill shared with you, and I got one of those from Kasia. After the initial shock of learning of his death, I couldn’t help but smile. Kasia had sent out an email to me, just to me, and it was personal, and I realized that his dear daughter had inherited Bill’s way of reaching out to people one on one, making them feel as if you were the only person in the world that mattered.

Thanks, Bill for your friendship, for your knowledge, and for what you’ve given our industry. We already miss you.

www.legacy.com/obituaries/mercurynews/obituary.aspx?pid=158762823

//John

One of the new trends in making web content more social is the recording of reader impressions or reactions. For example, I just read an article about Father’s Day and the article included a poll that allowed me to quickly provide my response or impression of the content. The poll wasn’t a questionnaire that I’d never take the time to fill out. Instead, it was just a few buttons or image maps that require a single click:

What’s interesting about this is that not only do I get to enjoy the article content, but I also get an indication of how others perceive or respond to the content — obviously making the content more social. What a great idea! 

Another interesting part of this to me is the choice to keep the response anonymous and aggregated. The above image, for example, shows the categories of reader response but doesn’t tell me exactly who responded in any of the categories. Certainly it would be possible, especially if this were tied to Facebook or Google Plus, to see what my friends or colleagues think about the content too.

I wonder whether the anonymity preference is specific to US English readers. As I think about it, I’m happy to participate in the poll, but I might not want to make my specific opinion public knowledge. I wonder if other cultures would feel differently in general? What groups of people would feel more open to expressing opinions publicly and associating their real or online identities to their response?

Oh, my response to this particular article was “THINK”…but not about the article content. Instead, the article and the poll made me think about changes in social media. Every time I think we’ve tapped our creative juices out, somebody thinks of something new and impressive to make the online world more social. 

Recently I was asked to fill in an online questionnaire. As I began the form, an entire window was shown to me, and it had a single UI item on it, a language selection list. Of course, I had to click on the list, wondering what wonderful choices I might have for a user interface. Surprisingly, the list revealed a single entry: English.

If you sometimes read my blog, you’ll know that I’m particularly interested in language lists at the moment. However, if you are interested in providing a list, I do have one additional suggestion…if you don’t have any choices, you probably shouldn’t use a selection list. It’s just too much of a bummer when nothing else is available and just doesn’t make much sense. Maybe disable it until your UI does provide additional languages.

That’s it for today. 

The IUC 36 call for papers went out last week – www.unicodeconference.org/e/IUC36-CfP-03-29-12.htm

This conference event brings together the best minds, ideas, and practices in the worlds of internationalization and localization,  There’s content sessions to please everyone including technical engineers, project managers, and product managers.

The Program Committee is requesting proposals for presentations. Check out the website for details, but some of the general areas are the following:

• Application Areas
  • Social Nets
  • SEO
  • Websites and web services
  • Libraries and educatoin
  • IDN
  • Mobile and Tablets
  • Security
  • Machine Translation
• General Techniques
  • i18n libraries
  • bidirectionality and scripts
  • html5
  • Data formats: json, xml,
  • project mgmt
  • font dev
• Culture and Tech
  • Endangered languages
  • Unencoded languages
  • Case studies
  • ISO language tag issues
• Regional Considerations
  • Africa, Asia, Middle East
  • Locales and CLDR
  • Emoji Support … sigh…

If you think you might want to present something new and exciting that you have been working on, consider presenting at the conference. Read the above link to find out more.

One last thing. Check out that Gold Sponsor!

Presenting a user interface in the customer’s language should be a high priority from your product management team. If not, they’re not doing their job in my opinion. Assuming you have the feature in your product roadmap, how do you choose the UI language of your customer on the web. After all, web applications have multiple, sometimes conflicting language signals.

A language signal is an indicator that gives your application a hint of your customer’s preferred language. In a web application, these signals are numerous. To help you in choosing from all these signals, I believe you should honor the preferences in the following priority. That is, check each signal for its existence in this order, and use the first signal that is available:

1. query parameters, for example example.com?lang=fr
2. domain name or path parameters, i.e. fr.example.com or example.com/fr
3. persistent application preferences
   • cookies
   • customer profile or settings
4. browser accept-language headers
5. geolocation hints
6. default application language

Query Parameters

Query parameters are often used to override every other language or application signal. If parameters are used, your customer (QE engineers or even end users) are intentionally trying to coerce the application into ignoring all other language signals. Query parameters beat out any other language signal when they are provided in the same request.

Domain name or Path Parameters

Sometimes you will partition your localized sites by domain name or by language tag paths. A domain name partition means that you select different or even localized domain names for specific markets. For example, your French site could be fr.example.com. You can also distinguish language preference on the path like this: example.com/fr or example.com/en-gb. When query parameters don’t exist, this is the next choice in our prioritization.

Persistent Settings

Of course, if your application has allowed the user to select a language preference, the application should honor that preference. The preference may be stored in a cookie or even in a user profile attribute on the server.

Accept-Language Header

Most browsers provide a list of user language preferences in each request. These languages are provided in request headers as values of the accept-language attribute. This attribute can have 1 or more language codes, and they indicate the priority of the user when requesting content. In the absence of other signals, your application should respond to the accept-language header.

Geolocation Hints

The last signal that actually provides information about the user is the geographic location from which the user is accessing your content. Although imperfect and imprecise, geography can provide a hint to your customer’s language preference. It’s definitely not the best indicator because multiple languages can be spoken in any geographic location. In a pinch, though, you may be able to provide a language selection tool that provides a list of the most prominent languages spoken in a specific area of the world.

Default Application Language

Finally, when all else fails and there have been no other indicators, you can provide the UI in the default language of the application. If your company is in Germany, maybe the default is German. If it’s the U.S., your default language is most likely English…or maybe even Spanish. You have to display the application in some language, and the default at this point is your last option.

In Summary

To summarize, a web application can serve a global audience. In doing so, it may accommodate customers in a variety of languages. Your application’s user interface may be selected from numerous possibilities, numerous signals from the user. Those signals are important data points to consider when making the language choice to present to the user. Using the signals described in this article, you’ll be able to consider some of the more important language preference indicators. Follow the prioritization I’ve outlined here, and you’ll make the right language choice most of the time…until you don’t. And there will be times when you don’t make the right choice from all these signals. When that happens, and it will happen, you have to give your users some way to indicate that problem. Take a look at my previous blog entry about language selection widgets for help with that.

The Unicode Consortium announced the release of Unicode 6.1.0 yesterday. The new version adds characters for additional languages in China, other Asian countries and Africa. This version of the standard introduces 732 new characters.

In addition, the standard also added “labels” for character properties that will supposedly help implementers create better regular expressions that are both easier to read and easier to validate. I admit little knowledge about these labels at the moment, but will research and report on them in the future if time allows.

One of the oddities of the new version is the inclusion of 200 emoji variants. This is perhaps the only issue of the standard that I just don’t understand. Back in the day when I was more involved in Unicode development, we had a huge effort to unify variants of Chinese characters. We preached that Unicode characters were abstract entities with glyph renderings that were determined by font, style preferences of developers and apps. Now it appears that the Unicode consortium has changed its position on this.  Or maybe partially?. The addition of 200 emoji “variants” just seems unnecessary, but that’s just my opinion and I admit that I may not know all the issues that formed the consortium’s decision.

We have some examples, straight from the announcement, that show only 4 of the 200 new emoji variants:

As the image shows, the “TENT” emoji has two variants — a text style and a more colorful, graphical emoji style. The standard defends these variants by saying that it allows implementations to distinguish preferred display styles. I think that is what fonts are for. Personally, I just don’t think variants are needed. And, I think that the variants make things more difficult for applications.

What do you think about variants in general? And what about emoji variants specifically?

You have to respect Apple. They have excellent products that are known worldwide for their quality and ease-of-use. Part of that ease-of-use comes from their commitment to producing internationalized, world-ready products. However, even the best companies and employees make mistakes.

Recently I purchased a new iMac 27″ computer for my family. Of course, they don’t believe it is for them since I spend the most time using it. But I’m going to stick with my story…it’s the new family computer. Anyway, I immediately noticed that Apple is pushing their iCloud service. During setup and first run of things like iPhoto, I was prompted to choose whether I wanted to use iCloud for backups, etc.

Of course, I had to try out the iCloud service, so I entered all my personal details — name, account id, etc. The service works as expected, and I have nothing interesting to report on that.

To make iCloud clearly available and visible, Apple puts the iCloud service settings into the System Preferences application.

Clicking on the iCloud icon brings up the iCloud settings of course. Again, not much to say there. You have all the typical iCloud-able apps to choose from: Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Photo Stream, etc. However, I did quickly notice that iCloud had a little trouble with my name. Instead of showing my full name as John O’Conner, the iCloud app prominently displayed it as John O'Conner. Oops.

I admit that this is not the first time I have seen my name displayed in this way. Web forms sometimes mistakenly store my name using character entity references. Apparently the apostrophe sends bank and medical systems into fits of confused stupor. However, I’m surprised that it trips up Apple in this way.

It just goes to show you that even some of the best companies can make mistakes with how they handle and display text data. It’s common to normalize text when putting it into a database. However, I don’t think a character entity reference is the right thing to put into your db. If you do, you certainly should remember to decode it when you display it to your user.

The questions pop up often enough in internationalization circles so I’ll address them here:

1. how should I localize a language selection list?
2. how should I sort it?

Localized Language Lists

Customers use a language selection list to change languages. You must assume that the currently selected language is inappropriate for some reason. One possible reason is that the user cannot read the page content. This means that a loc