Re: Web browsers and the new language code for Hebrew

On Mon, 10 Feb 1997, Koen Holtman wrote:

> Misha Wolf:
> [...]
> >What I want to raise is a very particular problem: Two of the browsers that 
> >handle Hebrew (maybe this should read "The two browsers that handle 
> >Hebrew"), recognise the old language code ("iw") but not the new one ("he").
> 
> Why do these browsers need a language code at all?  Can't they just rely on
> the charset value?

Good question! Should have asked Misha when he called me this morning :-(.
The fact that there are more than one language (which Chris suggests)
is only relevant if the browser indeed wants to do different things
for different languages. That might be needed in text-to-speech
conversion and such, but I don't think that this was Misha's main
concern. Probably it's more that for a big data provider, it's
better to try to do things correctly and fully from the start,
and in this case, inconsequences such as iw/he are annoying.

> I don't know if this makes things easier, but you have a third option: put
> both the old and the new code in the accept-language field (you must use a
> comma as the separator).

It's not the problem of what to put in the accept header. It's the question
of what to send back (in Content-language and in the LANG attributes
inside a document).

Regards,	Martin.

Received on Monday, 10 February 1997 12:53:05 UTC