We had a coffee shop that tried to do it. Listed prices included taxes, and the total prices were in nice whole numbers (IE, $2 for a cup of coffee, $5 for a latter, $8 for a sandwich, etc.). But regulators stopped them and they had to go back to listing the prices without the sales tax.
It's frustrating how much needless friction gets put into the system.
I still don’t understand what people think they’re accomplishing with the lang attribute. It’s trivial to determine the language, and in the cases where it isn’t, it’s not trivial for the reader, either.
It states the cargo culted reasons, but not the actual truth.
1) Pronounciation is either solved by a) automatic language detection, or b) doesn't matter. If I am reading a book, and I see text in a language I recognize, I will pronounce it correctly, just like the screen reader will. If I see text in a language I don't recognize, I won't pronounce it correctly, and neither will the screen reader. There's no benefit to my screen reader pronouncing Hungarian correctly to me, a person who doesn't speak Hungarian. On the off chance that the screen reader gets it wrong, even though I do speak Hungarian, I can certainly tell that I'm hearing english-pronounced hungarian. But there's no reason that the screen reader will get it wrong, because "Mit csináljunk, hogy boldogok legyünk?" isn't ambiguous. It's just simply Hungarian, and if I have a Hungarian screen reader installed, it's trivial to figure that out.
2) Again, if you can translate it, you already know what language it is in. If you don't know what language it is in, then you can't read it from a book, either.
3) See above. Locale is mildly useful, but the example linked in the article was strictly language, and spell checking will either a) fail, in the case of en-US/en-UK, or b) be obvious, in the case of 1) above.
Your whole comment assumes language identification is both trivial and fail-safe. It is neither and it can get worse if you consider e.g. cases where the page has different elements in different languages, different languages that are similar.
Even if language identification was very simple, you're still putting the burden on the user's tools to identify something the writer already knew.
Language detection (where “language”== one of the 200 languages that are actually used), IS trivial, given a paragraph of text.
And the fact is that the author of the web page doesn’t know the language of the content, if there’s anything user contributed. Should you have to label every comment on HN as “English”? That’s a huge burden on literally every internet user. Other written language has never specified its language. Imposing data-entry requirements on humans to satisfy a computer is never the ideal solution.
Do you have any reference of that or are you implying we shouldn't support the other thousands[0] of languages in use just because they don't have a big enough user base?
> And the fact is that the author of the web page doesn’t know the language of the content, if there’s anything user contributed. Should you have to label every comment on HN as “English”? That’s a huge burden on literally every internet user.
In the case of Hacker News or other pages with user submitted and multi-language content, you can just mark the comments' lang attribute to the empty string, which means unknown and falls back to detection. Alternatively, it's possible to let the user select the language (defaulting to their last used or an auto-detected one), Mastodon and BlueSky do that. For single language forums and sites with no user-generated content, it's fine to leave everything as the site language.
> Other written language has never specified its language. Imposing data-entry requirements on humans to satisfy a computer is never the ideal solution.
There's also no "screen reader" nor "auto translation" in other written language. Setting the content language helps to improve accessibility features that do not exist without computers.
I wish this comment was true, but due to a foolish attempt to squish all human charactets to 2 bytes as UCS (that failed and turned into the ugly UTF-16 mess), a disaster called Han Unification was unleashed upon the world, and now out-of-band communication is required to render the correct Han characters in a page and not offend people.
> It states the cargo culted reasons, but not the actual truth
This dismisses existing explanations without engaging with the mentioned reasons. The following text then doesn't provide any arguments for this.
> Pronunciation is either solved by a) automatic language detection, or b) doesn't matter.
There are more possibilities than a and b. For example, it may matter for other things than pronunciation only. Also it may improve automatic detection or make automatic detection superfluous.
> If I am reading a book [...] I will pronounce it correctly, just like the screen reader will. If I see text in a language I don't recognize, I won't pronounce it correctly, and neither will the screen reader.
A generalization of your own experience to all users and systems. Screen readers aim to convey information accessibly, not mirror human ignorance.
> There's no reason that the screen reader will get it wrong, because <hungarian sentence> isn't ambiguous
This is circular reasoning. The statement is based on the assumption that automatic detection is always accurate - which is precisely what is under debate.
> If you can translate it, you already know what language it is in.
This a non sequitur. Even if someone can translate text, that doesn't mean software or search engines can automatically identify that language.
I love this, but how do you end up with 739 users? That's both a lot of users, implying that this isn't just a total hobby, and also not a lot of users, which means it hasn't been marketed THAT heavily. What's your secret? Where do you find that niche?
I'm now starting to think in terms of high-leverage videos that celebrate strangers on their birthdays (that are more likely to spread based on merit / wholesomeness rather than ad budget alone). Here's an example of one of these videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSOt2_dIiPI)—hoping to keep iterating and testing out various ideas (with the same core idea of celebrating strangers on their birthdays).
Thanks for your comment, and feel free to let me know if you have any ideas or follow up questions :)
Source: just left GOOG after 5 years on the GitHub tooling team.