Re: New Requirements Draft

Martin J. Dürst wrote:
> > What commercial systems
> > deploy with built in support for variant handling?
> 
> I don't know many commercial web servers. But definitely
> DynaWeb or what the server from INSO is called does, and
> goes to extremely great detail. Also, Apache deploys with
> built in support for variant handling.

Apache is not, of course, "commercial" in the sense that Yaron probably
meant - the fact that many, many commercial sites use it is probably
considered irrelevant.

However, I fail to see that "commercial" has any bearing whatsoever on
the issue.

> > How many people use those systems?
> 
> More and more. They haven't been around for such a long time,
> and it takes time for people to realize that these things are
> supported, and to learn how to use them.

Variant support in Apache is certainly sufficiently widely used that we
have had to work on it several times over the years.

> > How many web sites use variants as opposed to
> > having a "choose English here" tag?
> 
> See above. And the "choose English here" tag is not a definite
> indication that server-side variant support is not used. Both
> are necessary in a transitory phase.

Some sites actually use both - you get the language you prefer by
default, but can force a different one by choosing the appropriate
language link (see www.iigs.org, for example - quite a cute trick, I
thought).

Cheers,

Ben.

-- 
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