Re: font/char set question: Chinese Amazon charset: Autodetect: Not! . . . . . . . [tlug]

["Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com>]

On 30/07/07, Birkir A. Barkarson <birkirb@example.com> wrote:

> Since Amazon.jp most likely doesn't offer their pages in multiple
> languages it wouldn't have any effect. Of course the do offer some of
> the interface in English so that might be displayed by default if you
> change the order to en, jp ... but only if they actually support this
> setting (not all websites do despite being multilingual).

BAB is right; Amazon sites are not generally multilingual, with two
quasi-exceptions: JP and CA.

JP supports some stuff in en_US
CA supports most stuff in fr_CA

There was a push to make all Amazon sites truly multilingual, but the
engineering cost turned out to be *much* higher than anticipated[1],
so the project has not yet succeeded.

Again, I want to do this for the mobile site this year, but I simply
may not be able to sell the business case, even if it is a very cool
thing to do.

Cheers,
Josh

[1] Remember, Amazon is *the* original online bookstores, and one of
the trailblazers of e-commerce, so our system grew up from one BSD box
in Jeff Bezos's garage to tens of thousands of Linux servers
worldwide. Our system has lots of bits that are extremely
well-engineered, but the glue can sometimes be hard to work with. This
is kinda like a microcosm of the Internet / Web itself, wouldn't you
say? I think our availability and customer focus speak to the
strengths of our system; it does not always work perfectly, but you
very seldom, as a customer (and I *am* an Amazon customer; I use the
same retail website as you, not a special employees-only store), get
an error that is fatal to your shopping session. i.e. Shit Happens,
but Shit Gets Fixed, so you typically see an error, refresh, and
continue shopping with nary a second thought. Occasionally, you have
to leave your computer, make a cup of tea, and come back before
refreshing, but then again, your OS / DE is likely to cause you to
have to do this more often than Amazon.com. I think it is very much
like the Internet; for the most part, most of the time, it Just Works.
Packets get dropped, but you almost never notice, and trouble gets
routed around automatically.

For further proof that this is not A Bad Idea, see Google's very
similar approach to scalability and availability.