The Google Approach to Internationalization

I live in Brussels, Belgium, and thus every time I access any webpage, the server has a hard time guessing what language I want that page to be in. If you were the www.google.be server, here are a couple of sane ways you could make up your mind:

• Trust the HTTP Accept-Language request header and serve the page in English.
• Notice that the request was originally sent to google.com and serve the page in English.
• Notice that the originating IP address is from Brussels, where 85% of residents are French-speakers, and serve the page in French.
• If request is made during working hours, acknowledge that the user isn't especially likely to live in Brussels proper, and pick at random between Dutch, English or French.

Alternatively, you could ignore the fact that good solutions even exist, rest on the fact that 59% of Belgians speak Dutch, and use this as an opportunity to plug your browser's translation service.

Photo or Video ?

About twelve years ago, Philip Greenspun wrote this in an article about "old" cameras:

If you have or inherit an extensive manual-focus system, you should get the bodies professionally cleaned and adjusted and then enjoy the system for another decade or two. After that, we'll all probably just be using high-resolution video cameras and picking out interesting still frames.

Freeze frames good enough to pass as photos? I was doubtful at the time, but look at this picture from my second New York post:



It isn't really a photograph in the usual sense, but indeed a still from a movie. Could you tell? Even in the low light of Washington Square at dusk, a 5DmkII movie freeze frame is good enough to pass as a photo on the Web.

But that's the Web. Surely this doesn't apply to serious photographs… or does it? Actually it does. A year ago, Esquire's cover was a still from a movie filmed expressly for the purpose of making a magazine cover. Arguably the Red One video camera used for this is too expensive for most photographers, but we're getting there.

So was Philip right? I'm still doubtful… For me, 99.9% of the time, filming and making stills are completely different processes. I just focus on different aspects of a scene when I'm capturing motion pictures. I think I'm far from alone in this: since the momentous Esquire cover, photographers have not exactly stampeded to video cameras, even those with the budget to do so. I'd guess they still believe that still cameras are still the best tools for taking still pictures. (No pun intended.) But maybe that's only their prejudice. We'll see. The quality certainly is there.