Re: Web Browser Preferences and Internationalisation/Accessibility

On Nov 18, 2009, at 5:10 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>  
> wrote:
>>
>> On Nov 18, 2009, at 3:39 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I have a very concrete request and I am not sure that the HTML WG is
>>> the right place to solve it, but please bear with me.
>>> If we want to improve accessibility and internationalisation  
>>> support,
>>> I believe we need to do something.
>>>
>>> All modern Web browsers have user preferences and as part of these,
>>> you can choose your preferred languages for displaying Web pages.
>>> These preferences are different to the language in which your
>>> browser's user interface is presented: you can e.g. run your browser
>>> in English and still want your Web pages inside the browser  
>>> preferably
>>> to display Japanese or French or some other language over English.
>>>
>>> Now, not all browsers actually expose this preference setting to Web
>>> pages. AFAIK, only Internet Explorer does:
>>>
>>> IE has:
>>> navigator.browserLanguage -> Browser Localized Language
>>> navigator.systemLanguage   -> Windows OS - Localized Language
>>> navigator.userLanguage       -> Windows OS - Regional Settings (this
>>> is the exposure of preferences)
>>>
>>> Firefox only has:
>>> navigator.language -> only the browser's localized language - no way
>>> to get the preference in javascript
>>
>> navigator.language contains the same info that's in the UA string,  
>> I believe
>> it works in all the non-IE browsers, and it's totally accessible from
>> JavaScript.
>
> No, it doesn't. It contains the language that your browser has been
> installed in.
> See, for example,
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1043339/javascript-for-detecting-browser-language-preference
> .
>
> I had assumed the same and based my subtitle tests on that and ran
> into some nasty issues with some French friends of mine, which upon
> debugging exposed this issue. It is mentioned all over the web when
> you try and look for language preference exposure in javascript.
>

[...]

>
> You're right and it actually exposes the same language as  
> navigator.language.
>
> What I meant to write was that you have to analyse the
> "Accept-Language" header of the HTTP request, which in fact contains
> the browser preference settings. This is a horrible hack and the only
> way for a Web page to find out the browser preference settings.
>
> Try it for yourself: go into Firefox's preferences and add a language
> that's not English and make it your first one. Then inspect your
> navigator.language setting and your HTTP headers (firebug helps).

Thanks for the clarification. For what it's worth, Safari doesn't have  
this issue; it uses the OS language setting and doesn't have a  
separate "install language" or browser-level language preference.  
Perhaps Mozilla folks can comment on the Firefox behavior.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Thursday, 19 November 2009 01:27:19 UTC