Universal Language Selector/2012-03-26 analysis

Copied from l10n-uls.

Discussion of language selector competitive review
Version 0.1.3 by Pau 2012-03-26

Meeting goals

 * Consensus on us having seen whatever can be seen outside of out own universe wrt to language selection and input methods, so that we will not re-invent the wheel, when there are use case implementations that fit our needs.
 * If no, specific directions for additional desk research.
 * Detect the solutions that do not fit our needs, because our use cases are different.
 * List of concepts.

Questions
Something like this? http://harvesthq.github.com/chosen/ -- http://jqueryui.com/demos/autocomplete/#combobox
 * NL: Did any of the sites have design that supports changing list of supported languages? Think of Wikipedia articles, where each article may have different set of other languages.
 * PG: Section "Cross-language content references" (slides 41-43) has some similar examples but none with the volume of languages of Wikimedia projects.
 * ST: Interestingly, I did not find any of these provide an auto-complete based selection of languages, may be because their list of languages is not lengthy?-Found microsoft has it.
 * AS: on slide 16 - based on patterns detected is there a recommendation that Pau is suggesting? would like to see recommendations on best practices for each category
 * GM people come to wikipedia articles for a first time either through a search in a search engine or through an interwiki link. In both cases the user indicates some proficiency in the language. We know our users through cookies and stuff. We can ask when people are new to a language about their proficiency and have this result in a user interface in a language
 * GM our domain setup is already language specific - having it as a default is not bad practice
 * GM all these projects researched do not have our number of languages and its associated issues
 * GM mobile devices have different requirements and restrictions