Topic awaiting preservation: usability question: language selector

Cheers my fellow inmates! I've been in solitary confinement for some time now...

Which of the following options for a language selector would you rate as the best in terms of usability:

1.) text-links in english like so:

german | english | french | spanish

2.) text-links in each language like so:

deutsch | english | francais | espanol

3.) little country-flags as used by slysoft.com

???

<´¯`·.¸ Patric ¸.·´¯`>

I'd go for a little list of country flags with appropriate ALT attributes :

Deutsch | English | Français | Español | Klingon

Imho it's better to name the languages in the languages, not in the selected language. And don't forget to set the lang or xml:lang attirubte on your HTML tag.

Yup, definitely agree with poi here, and don't use that filthy US/British flag either! *euch!

I might use something like a drop down list (with CSS) that has some sort of little short, play-once animation when loaded to help it get noticed and make it obvious it has something to do with multiple languages without taking up a lot of space in the long run. I would not use flags...they only barely make sense if you're using only a handful of the most popular languages; English, French, German, Chinese...lame.

But, reisio, if someone wants a page in a particular language because they, for example, come from the country that language is native to, thne surely they owuld know their own flag? Those who don't know what the flag is for probably don't know the language and, as such, it owuldn't hold an significance for thme if it did. I'd go for the flags with appropriate alt attributes.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

Odds are they would know their own flag or but there are many countries (Mexico & Spain, Brazil & Protugal) that speak a language of another flag. So the language in the appropriate language seems best.

(they should be able to figure it out but they might not).



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

I like Poi's suggestions. In particular the using the "alt" tag !!!

Checking out the "slysoft.com" site - I didn't know what language the second last flag was supposed to be until I had a look.

sib

Thanks everybody,

I'll go for poi's suggestion...

<´¯`·.¸ Patric ¸.·´¯`>

I'd go with the multi-lingual text. In the midst of a foreign language its easy to spot your own. Probably faster download too. The downside would be when russian/chinese text is displayed as weird charactars.

There are ways around that, but you would think at the very least a person would have the proper text support for their native language.

Read this too: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/flags.html

It'd be slightly more accessible if the ALT attributes were :

Deutsche version | English version | version Française | versión Española | Bork Bork

For sure, using some little flag images generates some HTTP queries, but the images are well below 1Kb.
Oh and obviously avoid the image map solution seen on Slysoft, but prefer an UL version for greatter accessibility.

Last but not least, if not already set by the user, you could guess the language thanks to its IP ( via some ip2country process ) or via an intermediary page using JavaScript to retrieve the language of the OS or of the UserAgent. ( in case of various languages found, you should give less priority to English as its quite likely the user have installed its OS or UA in English )