RE: [WAI-IG] Serving my page in the right language

> > Using the accept language header removes the need to 
> > actively select the language from the great majority of
> > users at the cost of slightly reducing the ease of
> > selecting a different language for the minority.
> 
> There is a legacy problem.  I have run into sites that
> assume "English" is there from the browser default, so
> the presense of any other language (even not in the first
> position) forces me into that language.  This might even
> be a sensible guess, though it wasn't correct for me.
> 
> In a few cases, I even got 404s, because they didn't support 
> "my" language yet, though they did support English.  

That isn't a legacy problem; it was never correct behaviour.
That said, it is reasonable to return a language other than the first one listed
in some cases, if a user prefers English, but will also accept French
(Accept-Language: en, fr) and the server has a French original and an English
translation that the people behind the server don't think is a very good
translation, then it may be appropriate to serve the French version (the
quality numbers in the Accept-Language headers are intended to help with this,
unfortunately most browsers don't allow the user to get at them).

-- 
Jon Hanna
<http://www.hackcraft.net/>
"…it has been truly said that hackers have even more words for
equipment failures than Yiddish has for obnoxious people." - jargon.txt

Received on Monday, 22 March 2004 12:29:06 UTC