This is pretty great, and works perfectly for me on Windows 10, Waterfox 56.2.2.

A few thoughts:

- Since the entries are so large now, perhaps language flags can be incorporated as well? This may or may not lead to quicker identification for some people.

- Can a spellcheck be built into the system? I can foresee some people mispelling or using unconventional spellings for languages. For instance, if someone types 'Panjabi', it would be ideal if the results for 'Punjabi' are displayed nonetheless.

- Alternately, perhaps we can set 'hidden' alternate names for certain languages, to account for those alternate spellings. For instance, a lot of people know Persian as 'Farsi', but typing in Farsi shows no results.

- The present light grey highlight for matching text is hard to see. I would recommend using a different colour, maybe the default green that Tatoeba uses.

Great! It is definitely more comfortable to use.

A few comments:

The highlight is only shown when the language starts with the entered text. For example, using the English UI, typing "rus" highlights "Rus" in "Russian" and "Rusyn" but not in other entries, like "Belarusian".

The sorting of the suggested values could be improved. In the above example, I think "Russian" should show up above "Belarusian".

I can type anything that is not a language name and press the search button. The result is that whatever wasn’t a language name is treated as "any language". This is quite misleading. I think the form shouldn’t allow clicking the search button without a properly selected value as language.

On the search bar, the keyword field, the language drop downs and the search button use to have a consistent height. Now, the drop downs are bigger than the keywords field and the button.

As I suggested in the ticket (https://github.com/Tatoeba/tatoeba2/issues/1651):

Currently, with this new dropdown menu, when a user deletes the default option in the search's language, he/she sees the languages he/she chose in his/her profile and then every other language. My suggestion is: maybe the dropdown, at least for registered users, should be limited to the languages that a user chose in his/her profile when no specific language is selected, since it's likely that this user would stick only to such languages when searching for sentences, and, for all the other languages, he/she would have to type them manually to get them in the dropdown menu, since they're less likely to be used for custom searches

Edit = in any case, it works fine for me. I tried it on an Amazon Fire and Ubuntu

Thanks everyone. Based on the various feedback, I have made some changes which you can test on the dev website.

1. The dropdown list will now always open, without having to type anything at first. The only thing that may feel a bit strange is that the text input is emptied. I haven't found a way to keep the text AND open the dropdown list at the same time. I think it's still usable like this though.

2. If you don't select any language, it will go back to the language that was initially selected. In case you would type in something that leads to "No language found" and then click outside of the dropdown, the value you typed will be replaced by a valid option (whichever option was previously selected).

3. The highlight for the matching text is more visible (yellow background).

4. The results list in priority languages that start with the searched text.

Just to be sure, I'll give it one more week of testing. If there's no major issue and we overall agree that this new dropdown is more comfortable to use, it will be deployed next weekend on the main website.


Regarding the other suggestions that I have not implemented:

> Since the entries are so large now, perhaps language flags can be incorporated
> as well?

I had this in mind but ran into the issue that the dropdown list doesn't expand to fit the longest language name, at least I haven't yet found a way to do that. There are actually already some languages that are truncated and adding an extra icon will lead to even more languages being truncated. I think it is better to stick with names only until we find a solution to display all names entirely.

> Can a spellcheck be built into the system? I can foresee some people mispelling or
> using unconventional spellings for languages.

I guess this can be solve not exactly with a spellcheck but with some sort of approximate search. It's definitely possible but not something I would implement in a first iteration.

> Alternately, perhaps we can set 'hidden' alternate names for certain languages,
> to account for those alternate spellings. For instance, a lot of people know Persian
> as 'Farsi', but typing in Farsi shows no results.

For languages that have alternate names, I think for now we will need to resort to parenthesis: Persian (Farsi).
As we integrate more and more languages, we will definitely need to think of a better solution, especially if there are languages that have more than two names or if both names are very long.

> maybe the dropdown, at least for registered users, should be limited to the
> languages that a user chose in his/her profile when no specific language
> is selected, since it's likely that this user would stick only to such languages
> when searching for sentences

I'm not too sure whether this will really help. Let's say I've been using Tatoeba for a few days and I decide to register. I only have 2 languages in my profile. I want to search something and when I click on the language selector, I only see 2 options. At this point I might be wondering why did all the languages disappear? When I was not registered I used to be able to see all the languages.