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Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

copying my comment from reddit:

If a user doesn't recognise the word "English" then they are not going to have any idea what language select. The reason the languages are all listed on the page without any interaction needed is so someone can look at the webpage and recognise their language and select it without having to understand anything else. How do I access the main page of a wiki?

This isn't redefined, it's just a redesign with some bad, some good, aesthetic changes.

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The existing front-page looks like it should work in browsers with JS disabled (though I have not personally tested this).

We should think carefully about the possible consequences of Wikipedia dropping support for no-JS browsers.

It does. Being properly engineered, it's semantically accessible with any browser or scraper or mashup. Sacrificing that for a site as important as Wikipedia doesn't even deserve serious consideration.

I've been brainwashed by the article and is wondering what JS means here. IS or JS?

Javascript

Not to mention the front page colour bar for languages with labels appearing after rolling over has some pretty serious discoverability and accessibility issues.

2001 called; they want their mystery meat navigation back.

That's what Accept-Language[1] is for. They can just serve the right version of the page based on its value. And yes, I know it's annoying when sites just assume you speak the browser language but remember this would just set the default one in the text box, nothing else. Presumably, if you're using a browser in English you can also recognize the word "English" and change it to something else.

[1]: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14...

Not everyone accesses the internet on their own computer.

Seriously though, I never see the wikipedia front page. I either go through a link in google, start with 'en.' in the address bar, or start typing 'wiki' and choose a previous link. All of these are easier and more portable across browsers and OSs than the knowledge required to change your language locale.

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