Re: hreflang

On Feb 9, 2006, at 01:19, David Woolley wrote:

>> In fact, language negotiation depends on the premise that the
>> translations are in sync *and* the user trusts them to be in sync. I
>
> If you are using an IIS server and one of the common GUI user agents,
> this may be true,

AFAIK, even the mighty Apache does not have a mechanism for  
automatically marking translations stale when you update the master.

> but, at least to a qualitative level, it is not
> true for a server that properly implements language negotiation and
> for a user agent that allows proper specification of relative
> abilities in langauges.

We've had language negotiation for years and there's no "proper  
implementation" in sight. Shouldn't this indicate that this instance  
of architecture astronautics does not work or the cost of making it  
work outweighs the benefit?

>> that eg. debian.org is up to date in Finnish? If I set my browser to
>> prefer English, I can reasonable assume that I am seeing the latest
>> information.
>
> Debian.org should, in that case, qive a low q value for the Finnish  
> version,
> and you should give English an only slightly lower score than  
> Finnish.  That
> way, you will get Finnish versions if they are likely to be definitive
> and English otherwise.

The point is that the translations on debian.org may very well be in  
sync. How am I supposed to know as the user? I have to choose my  
strategy without knowledge of the inner workings of particular sites  
with the general assumption that translations are more or less stale  
some of the time anyway.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Thursday, 9 February 2006 09:34:37 UTC