Re: [WAI-IG] Serving my page in the right language

> 
> 
> I'am not sure that language detection is a good thing. When I use an
> English browser (I do) I want a French web site, a Russian website, etc.
> to be in the original language when arriving. Then I can change language

I think you are being confused by a combination of not knowing how to
configure your browser, and an over-simplification in the user interface
in your browser.

All common browsers allow you to list your language choices in order of
preference.  An English browser can be trivially modified to prefer 
Danish, or even to prefer a bogus language and therefore force the
language negotiating site to use its fallback language, which is probably
the site's optimum language.

The standard also allows one to set quality factors against languages
and good web servers (e.g. Apache) allow one to do that against the resource.
If one is equally fluent in Danish, French and Russian, you simply specify
q=1.0 against those languages and a lower value against English.  You will
then get the site's preferred language version if it matches any of those.
The problem here is that the common GUI browser choose those qualities
according to the position in the list of choices, or don't specify at all,
resulting in a tie breaking situation, but tie breaking will still achieve
your ideal, as you will then get the site's preferred language, consistent
with your choices.

Received on Tuesday, 16 March 2004 03:19:31 UTC