- From: Laurens Holst <lholst@students.cs.uu.nl>
- Date: Sat, 04 Feb 2006 16:48:27 +0100
- To: www-html@w3.org
Mikko Rantalainen schreef: > > Oskar Welzl wrote: >> 5.) It's Based On a Questionable Concept That Is Hardly Used >> >> I don't have exact figures, but I made a quick check and examined a few >> sites that do have multi-language versions. I chose sites I regularly >> visit and websites of bigger companies. Only two of them use language >> negotiation: hotmail and google (google only to display a tiny link to >> the real localized version). This might have several reasons, but one >> benefit: Language negotiation >> is a questionable concept anyway, and the lesser it's getting used, the >> better. Content negotiation in general is machine-to-machine >> communication. > > I disagree. Accept-Language would be one of the most important > features of an user agent *if* it contained real information. It does. It is frequently used by websites such as hotmail, Google, mozilla-europe.org and other large sites to present the user with a localised version of their website. I myself use it, too, on one of my pages [1]. Its default value is depending on the browser’s locale, which is pretty accurate as when the browser’s locale doesn’t match the user’s, it will be difficult for him to use the browser. In Internet Explorer, its locale is equal to the system’s language, and e.g. in the Netherlands a Dutch localisation of Windows is very common. As for Firefox, if a Dutch localisation of the browser is downloaded (which is offered to the user by default if his Accept-Language contains ‘nl’), it will also have a matching default for the accept-language header. In both browsers, this can be changed through the options, too. ~Grauw [1] http://www.tni.nl/products/bussum/ - although this is currently showing a very old backed-up version of the page which did not include the language detection yet, so another page pased on this one would be a better example [2]. [2] http://manuel.msxnet.org/msx/beurs/ -- Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san!! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Laurens Holst, student, university of Utrecht, the Netherlands. Website: www.grauw.nl. Backbase employee; www.backbase.com.
Received on Saturday, 4 February 2006 15:50:34 UTC