Re: hreflang

> Google, for one, is a _bad_ example, since it applies a confused mixture 
> of heuristics in deciding on the customization. Many people claim that 

At least for .co.uk domains, Google's language negotiation is orthogonal
to its market based server selection.  The choice of google.co.uk is, I think
made for marketing reaons, but Accept Language will still give you your
preferred language.   I suspect that is true of all the English speaking
countries.

If I make French may preferred language, I still get served by google.co.uk,
but the user interface is in French.  (If I use google.com, I don't, 
however, get redirected to google.co.uk.)

Incidentally, for a long time, anyone who actually read the screens when
doing a Windows Update would have been told about language negotiation.

I think one of the big reasons for its non-use is that authors generally
don't touch HTTP beyond using recipes to try and frustrate its caching.
HTTP is not really part of the one technology popularly called HTML, and
most authors want to use the one HTML/CSS/EcmaScript/DOM/Flash technology.

Received on Saturday, 4 February 2006 22:32:42 UTC