Shibboleth Developers

["Alistair Young" <>]

I'm not a great fan of browser side things. We'd have to cater for users
who pop into an internet cafe and who don't know how to/can't configure
their system to the language of choice. Also, in some institutions,
browser settings can't be changed due to desktop lockdown.
If you're a Gaelic speaker studying at a non-Gaelic institution for a few
days (it happens), you're constrained to that non Gaelic environment and
the consequent lockdown to English.
Rather, when displaying the list of IdP to choose from, they are also
given a list of supported languages that their chosen IdP supports. So,
they choose IdP and language. The language setting could then be stored in
the common domain cookie.
A federation would have to agree on a default, such as English, if the
user can't be bothered to choose language.
I can see language students having multiple preferences, depending on what
resources they're accessing at the SP and they want to use that particular
language at the IdP while authenticating/reading error messages/possibly
reading snippets of information that an SSO site may choose to make
available to it's federation community.
Alistair


-- 
Alistair Young
Senior Software Engineer
UHI@Sabhal
 Mòr Ostaig
Isle of Skye
Scotland

>
> On Fri, 5 Nov 2004, Alistair Young wrote:
>
>> has anyone considered localisation within a federation? We're looking at
>> extending IdP discovery to provide language selection.
>> Presumably if IdP locations are known, they are provided by IdP
>> suppliers.
>> It would presumably be feasible for them to also associate their IdP
>> with
>> supported languages.
>> An IdP could choose to ignore any language info that an SP may send
>> along
>> with it's initial Request but those that have multiple languages to
>> support (English/Gaelic/Welsh for example) can initialise their SSO
>> pages
>> accordingly.
>
> I am not particularly knowledgable about this stuff, but I would think
> that this would be an issue to be negotiated between the browser and each
> particular web-based service, rather than anything involving communication
> among Shib components.  That is, if you were running CAS or Pubcookie or
> CoSign as your websso, you might expect them to have localization support
> so that they could recognize the browser's language preference and deliver
> their content in the right language.  You might ask that of the Shib WAYF,
> and any Shib error pages too.  I'm sure the Shib team would appreciate
> contributions from anyone knowledgable in this area in helping the Shib
> components to do this right.  Yes?
>
>   - RL "Bob"
>
>