Re: hreflang

Hi.

I think it's kind of a vicious circle. Users see no reason for using the 
Accept-Language capabilities of their browsers (well, actually I think 
more than 80% don't even know, that they can interact with websites this 
way...) as long as web designers don't make use out of this header, 
while the web designers don't feel like having to develop content 
negotiation if there's noone out there to appreciate it.

So the whole point is to start with it on server side and to tell people 
about it. This includes people that are involved in web design (the UN 
doesn't use Unicode, valid HTML, content negotiation,... so perhaps 
anybody should just walk up to Kofi and tell him about this stuff...)

Regards

Manuel

Jukka K. Korpela schrieb:

>
> On Sat, 4 Feb 2006, Laurens Holst wrote:
>
>> Mikko Rantalainen schreef:
>
> - -
>
>>> Accept-Language would be one of the most important features of an 
>>> user agent *if* it contained real information. 
>>
>>
>> It does.
>
>
> Pardon? We know that it horrendously often contains _wrong_ 
> information. (Or did you mean to write "It is", saying that 
> Accept-Language is etc.?
> I see no reason to take away the conditionality.)
>
>> 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.
>
>
> Google, for one, is a _bad_ example, since it applies a confused 
> mixture of heuristics in deciding on the customization. Many people 
> claim that they cannot get to google.com but get thrown to google.de, 
> google.fi, etc., according to some guesswork.
>
> Anyway, the sites that utilize language negotiation are a small 
> minority, though they contain a few important sites. Consider, for 
> example, the fact that there is nothing resembling language 
> negotiation on the European Union site, despite the obvious needs - 
> it's often not just a matter of serving content in the user's native 
> language but also choosing between available versions according to 
> users' _other_ preferences (e.g., between French, English, and German, 
> if these are the only options).
>
> However, as Mikko mentioned, the real problem is that user agents do 
> not send adequate information. The _only_ way to achieve that is to 
> make user agents prompt for language information, i.e. to ask users to 
> specify their language preferences, in an easy way, _and_ to make the 
> preferences easily changeable (which is important especially on public 
> and classroom computers when user ids are not used).
>
> Before this, any improvements to the language negotiation mechanism 
> are waste of time.
>
>> Its default value is depending on the browsers locale,
>
>
> That's a big part of the problem.
>
>> which is pretty accurate as when the browsers locale doesnt match the 
>> users, it will be difficult for him to use the browser.
>
>
> That's not the point. Many people use English-language browsers and 
> systems for several reasons - for example, because a browser of their 
> choice exists only in an English version, or because its localization
> is awful (wrong translations, etc.).
>
> Besides, even if the language of your browser happens to be your 
> native language, what about all the _other_ languages you might know? 
> In the WWW context, even languages you know just a little are 
> important in the preferences.
>

Received on Saturday, 4 February 2006 21:39:56 UTC