USD Section 6.9 Transports

6.9 Transports

6.9.1 HTTP Accept-Language

The HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP) is often used for Web service message 
transport.  HTTP contains some header fields which are useful for identifying 
sender preferences and capabilities.  One of those fields is Accept-Language.

Accept-Language takes one or more language identifiers in RFC3066 (or its 
replacement) format as its parameters.  Each language identifier can have a 
quality value which gives a relative priority.  Here is an example:

	Accept-Language: zh-cn, fr-ch;q=0.8, fr;q=0.7

The above could be read as "Simplified Chinese is preferred, but Swiss French is 
acceptable, as are other types of French."  There is more information about the 
handling of Accept-Language in the HTTP 1.1 specification.

A Web service requester using HTTP can include an Accept-Language field to 
indicate the languages preferred.  The provider can then take that information 
and use it to return human-readable data in the appropriate language.

{Andrea's questions:  do we need a scenario here?  Also, should we mention 
Content-Language, if only to say that it's better to tag the language inside the 
doc?}

6.9.2 FTP

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a simple transport mechanism that can be used 
for Web service documents.  The main international consideration in using FTP is 
to specify the representation type as I (Image), allowing 8-bit values to pass 
unchanged through the transfer.

For more information on FTP representation types see RFC959.

{Andrea's question:  Was that what we were intending here?  There isn't much 
more to FTP from an i18n perspective.}

6.9.3 SMTP

{Andrea's note:  trying to slog through the SMTP RFCs to figure out what i18n 
considerations there are.  I may not get to this, so I'm sending what I have so 
far.}

Received on Friday, 19 March 2004 21:31:59 UTC