- From: Phillips, Addison <addison@amazon.com>
- Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:18:23 -0700
- To: Leif Halvard Silli <lhs@malform.no>, Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>
- CC: "'Ian Hickson'" <ian@hixie.ch>, "'HTMLWG'" <public-html@w3.org>, "www-international@w3.org" <www-international@w3.org>, "hsivonen@iki.fi" <hsivonen@iki.fi>
Most servers that do language negotiation that I'm aware of use external data (usually either directory structure or file names/file extensions) to determine the page to serve or a page scripting language (JSP, ASP, etc.) with language resources to assemble an appropriate page. In fact, I'm not aware of any software which uses <meta> for page processing or content selection. Hence my general tendency not to want to add it to the determination of page processing language in HTML5: it has the potential to alter how existing pages are processed to little benefit. Addison Addison Phillips Globalization Architect -- Lab126 Internationalization is not a feature. It is an architecture. > -----Original Message----- > From: www-international-request@w3.org [mailto:www-international- > request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Leif Halvard Silli > Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 4:18 AM > To: Richard Ishida > Cc: 'Ian Hickson'; 'HTMLWG'; www-international@w3.org; > hsivonen@iki.fi > Subject: Re: meta content-language > > > Richard Ishida 2008-08-18 16.48: > > > Leif, I'm not sure that makes sense... The prompt for the content > > negotiation should come from the user agent, since it reflects > the > > preferences of the user, not the language of a given page. The > user agent > > sends the user's preferences (or its defaults) via the Accept- > Language HTTP > > field, and the server uses that information to do content > negotiation (if > > enabled on the server). If the server finds a match, it returns > meta > > information about the document it is serving in the Content- > Language field > > of the HTTP header. > > > I did not intend to propose a change in anything. I just wondered > whether it could be tested whether servers actually read the META > elements in order to present things as you said. > > The trouble is that if you have 'page-english.html' and > 'page-german.html', and both of them contain <meta ... > content="en, de">, then such a negotiaton would not work. > > > > [...] > > >> Richard Ishida 2008-08-15 21.42: > >>>> From: Henri Sivonen [mailto:hsivonen@iki.fi] > >> > >>>> What purpose does metadata serve if it isn't actionable? > >>> > > >>> Metadata is actionable if some application is written to > >>> use it. It is not actionable if the information is not > >>> available. > > >> > >> Regarding the question of "actionable": Ideally, authors should > be > >> able to add content-language information via the META tag, and > >> then experience that the web server - and the Web browser - use > >> this information to perform language negotiation. > >> > >> Richard, you made many tests of how UAs react to language > tagging: > >> Perhaps it is possible to make test case for what web servers > and > >> browsers do with the content-langauage information with regard > to > >> content negotiation > > -- > leif halvard silli
Received on Tuesday, 19 August 2008 15:19:14 UTC