<rant>
Yesterday when I landed on the google homepage, I was interested in the googledoodle (“google doodle,” the customized, constantly changing logo-artwork around the word “google”), because it was obscure and artistic in a style that caught my attention. So I went to hover the cursor over the googledoodle, which will give a short explanation of what it’s about.
Lo, to my dismay, the googledoodle hovertext was hangeulized. It was a han-googledoodle. This struck me as annoying, but fortunately, I can read a little bit of Korean. It said: “호르헤 루이스 보르헤스 탄생 112주년” – [horeuhe ruiseu boreuheseu tansaeng 112 junyeon = Jorge Luis Borges’ 112th birtday]. Charming. A nice bit of googledoodling, to be sure (see picture). And… I love JLB, of course – how could I not, given my literarophilosophical predilictions? So, that’s a given.
But I felt a sensation of annoyed, impending rantiness about the issue of the hovertext, itself. I have been annoyed, before, because of a website’s laziness (that’s my perception of the site programmers affect, I mean) with respect to what I would call “language detection issues.”
Yes, it’s true that I’m in Korea. And my IP address says so. But there’s plenty of evidence available to the browser’s page-rendering software that can tell the webpage in question that I would prefer presentation of information in English – after all, that’s my computer’s OS installation language, and that’s my browser’s default language. Both pieces of information are in no way concealed from the browser, as far as I know. Most notably, I have visited plenty of sites that recognize my language (even before I log on – and I never save cookies so that’s not what’s going on, either) – inlcuding, lo and behold, gmail, which presumably shares programming expertise with googledoodlers, coxisting together in the same giant chocolate-factory-by-the-bay, as they do.
So when I see things like that – let’s call it “IP-address-driven language defaulting behavior” – it just pisses me off. It’s not that I don’t like the Korean – I even welcomed the brief puzzle that the hovertext presented. But it’s the fact that it seems to represent a parochial, lazy approach to solving a much more elegantly solvable web programming problem – that’s what annoys me.
Hence my desire to make this little rant, here.
</rant>
And, P.S., Happy Birthday to that benevolent bonaerense, blind prophet of postmodernism!
