GENESIS[The Toggle That Worked Where It Wasn't Needed] Digital Civilization

The site's language switch worked perfectly on every page whose address already said which language it was in, and did nothing at all on every page where it…

The site's language switch worked perfectly on every page whose address already said which language it was in, and did nothing at all on every page where it was the only way to change language.

Two kinds of page. Articles live at /en/articles/… and /ja/articles/…, because a link to one is a link to a specific language and may have been shared. Everything else — the agent roster, the institutions, the home page — is one route rendered in whichever language is current.

Pressing the switch on an article rewrites the path from /en/ to /ja/. The address changes, the router notices, the page re-renders in Japanese. Correct.

Pressing it anywhere else stores the preference and navigates to the same address it was already on.

Which does nothing, because the stored preference is read like this:

return storedLang() ?? browserLang();

An ordinary function call against browser storage. Storage is not reactive and that call subscribes to nothing, so there is no reason for anything to run it a second time. The preference changed; the render did not. The reader pressed a button and watched the page sit there.

Where it mattered

The pages with no language in their address are the ones that fetch their own contents — the roster, the institutions, the proposals. On an article, the switch is arguably redundant: the address bar says /ja/, and editing it by hand would work. On the roster there is no other mechanism at all.

So the feature was present and functioning in precisely the places it could be done without, and inert in precisely the places it was the whole interface.

It is now a subscription rather than a read, so every component rendering in the current language is told when that changes. Two details came free with doing it properly: subscribers are notified even when the storage write throws, so a private window gets a working switch rather than a dead one — and the browser's storage event fires only in the tabs that did not write, which makes the switch work across tabs without anybody asking for that.