Accept-Language language tag order

Hello all,

Back in November, there was a discussion [1] about the priority of
language tag order in the Accept-Language header. The discussion
centered around whether the order of language tags with equal quality
values (usually 1) was significant, and it seemed the consensus was to
not change the spec to say that they were, since most browser UAs
tended to send quality values correctly and changing the semantics of
the spec requires extreme circumstances.

However, I wonder if it might be beneficial to put a SHOULD in the
spec suggesting that UAs to sort the language tags in descending
quality order. I think most UAs already do this, and a SHOULD leaves
enough leeway for those who implemented the old standard, where things
were left ambiguous.

One argument against changing the spec was the desire to not have
exceptions that do not apply to all Accept headers. Thus, I recommend
that the same change be made for all Accept headers: items in a list
SHOULD be listed in descending quality value order.

(I haven't read the entire spec, so maybe this is already specified
somewhere, but I couldn't find it when I was looking for it.)

Thoughts?

Gordon

P.S. I'm not subscribed to this list, so please CC me on all relevant
discussion.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2011OctDec/thread.html#msg223

-- 
Gordon P. Hemsley
me@gphemsley.org
http://gphemsley.org/ • http://gphemsley.org/blog/

Received on Monday, 4 June 2012 14:50:15 UTC