[whatwg] Review of the 3.16 section and the HTMLInputElement interface

[Eduard Pascual]

On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 12:15 AM, Samuel Santos <samaxes at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 10:46 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, 5 Nov 2008, Samuel Santos wrote:
>> >
>> > I find it very hard to convince some clients that in order to have the
>> > browse button in their language they must configure their browsers. The
>> > vast majority of them don't even know where they can configure the
>> > default browser language, and don't feel they should even have to do it.
>> > It's also strange for them to have all the buttons in their language
>> > except the browse buttons.
>>
>> I understand but why don't they also complain about, say, the title of the
>> dialog box that comes up? Or the items on the context menus?
>>
>> Why do they use the wrong language browser in the first place?
>
> In Portugal a lot computers come with the english OS version.
> This means that the browser is in english and configured to have english as
> the default language.
>
> The problem with the input file button is that the client/user assumes that
> the text that appears in it is the developer's responsibility, like with the
> other button controls.
> In the example you gave he knows that the dialog box is from the UA
> (browser) and has nothing to do with the rest of the application.
> I'm pretty sure that this happens a lot in non-english countries.

I agree with Samuel in that this is an issue. In Catalunya, most often
Spanish software is used (both OS and browsers), because a lot of the
software is not easily (or at all) available in Catalan (specially
Microsoft software, such as Windows and IE, which ammount for a quite
big fraction of web surfers). Seeing Spanish stuff in pages that are
supposed to be in Catalan is quite annoying (especially when keeping
in mind some historic factors).

I can understand that there may be some security concerns with this
control; but I don't think changing the "Browse" caption poses any
threat. But if there is so much paranoia on this, browsers could be
allowed (or even required) to ask for confirmation when picking a file
if the caption has been changed (something like "Are you sure you
would like to submit C:\example.txt to example.com?" should be enough,
and users would easily see such question as comming from the UA rather
than from the webpage).