- From: Harald Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>
- Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 17:22:29 +0100
- To: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
- CC: ietf-http-wg@w3.org
On 11/23/2011 04:55 PM, Julian Reschke wrote:
> On 2011-11-23 16:41, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
>> I ran across this in a discussion, and went to check it up; it might
>> need fixing.
>> ...
>
> I'm not sure that "fixing" is the right term; HTTP doesn't assign
> semantics to the ordering, and AFAIU never has.
>
> How is this a problem in practice?
Well... either the semantics of the header
Accept-language: en, no
is that the languages are ordered by preference, or it does not imply an
ordering.
As of the time I wrote the RFC (2002), I observed multiple browsers
offering an UI that let people rank their preferences for language, and
observed the relevant Accept-Language: headers being sent without q= values.
When I inquired, the response was that "leftmost language wins".
If this is still "what people do", it should be documented.
Note: Firefox and Chrome seem to send q= values in my current versions.
The world might have changed.
But digging around in server-side code, I find that some code (which I
hope is not used) actually ignores q values totally and just picks
languages starting at left. Perhaps it hasn't.
Harald
Received on Wednesday, 23 November 2011 16:22:59 UTC