Re: [Lynx-dev] Proposed patch to init preferred-doc-lang from LANG/LANGUAGE

[Chuck Houpt]

> On Fri, Apr 27, 2007 at 11:08:32AM -0400, Chuck Houpt wrote:
> >  Certainly the motivation for the patch came from a problem
> >  encountered while building packages for multilingual systems. The
> >  problem was that Lynx was missing a desirable feature. The patch
>
> I guess that this is it.  I don't understand what "desirable feature"
> Lynx is missing wrt the patch.

Here's the typical scenario that the patch aims to fix:

Imagine a Japanese user, Ai, who knows little or no English and has 
never used Lynx (she is a technical professional, and fluent in 
Chinese - a likely technical lingua-franca of the 21st century).

Ai has just installed some multilingual flavor or Unix (like Debian, 
Mac OS X, etc) with Japanese set as the primary language (note: this 
means lynx packages are built with --enable-nls, and LANG or 
equivalent is automatically setup during installation).

While browsing the available software, she runs across a description 
of Lynx, and decides to try it out. She installs a Lynx package, 
opens a terminal window and enters "lynx http://google.com";.

At first, things look good - Lynx launches and says, in Japanese, 
"Loading google.com...", but then Google's front page appears in some 
foreign language (she thinks it might be English).

Ai's first impression of Lynx: "Too bad, looks like Lynx doesn't 
support Japanese web sites..."

Of course, Ai is a professional. She knows that if she digs into the 
doc/config/code of Lynx, there is probably some settings, work-around 
or patch. However, her first impression was bad, so she decides it is 
not worth the effort. It's a shame, Ai might have found Lynx to be 
very useful.

--

So the patch is not aimed at Lynx power-users - it's is aimed at new 
users. The goal is to make Lynx behave the way new users expect. 
Since most web browsers default the preferred language based on 
locale, users expect the same from Lynx.

- Chuck