Good post (and ensuing discussion) on Mezzoblue about how Canadian sites handle Language considerations. Many, including of course all Federal Government sites and some commercial sites like Future Shop, prefer to party like it’s 1999 and opt for a Splash page, while others, like HBC choose to arbitrarily present one language by default (usually English), allowing the user to switch. Air Canada has a slightly different approach (Note the ghetto-style browser warning that doesn’t recognize Firefox as being as capable as Netscape 7) and still others, like bell.ca will present a splash, but it’s more a main level nav in both languages… a touch more useful than just two buttons.
Some great discussion here, especially from developers in countries with more than two (and in the case of Africa, up to 11) official languages. Now that’s a challenge.
I’ll take a look at that later today (the link to Mezzoblue actually died in FireFox 1.0 a few seconds ago!).
Interesting, though. I was ranting about that bogus warning the other day when I was looking at booking a flight thru aircanada.com. I’ve also run into that warning all over the microsoft.com site(suprisingly!!)while researching some CRM products for my project.