Re: Accept-Language Support

Some additions to what Keld says:


From: Keld J|rn Simonsen <keld@dkuug.dk>
Date: Friday, July 18, 1997 3:25 AM



>gwm@austin.ibm.com writes:
>
>> We have several questions concerning Accept-Language as described in
>> rfc2068:
>>
>> Are there any browsers which already send an Accept-Language header
>> based on the user's language?
>
>The newer versions of netscape, explorer, alis tango
>and possibly a number of others do this.

Internet Explorer does it since version 2.0. Not user configurable until
4.0. IE3 and before
send the simple iso639 code depending on the OS user locale. IE3 has the bug
that it sends
CH instead of ZH for Chinese. IE4 is fully user configurable, the q factor
is calculated from the
user priority order.

>> Assuming that the browser does this, what should the server do
>> with this?
>
>Look at the best fit.

Yes. There is some discussion on what the associated q factor means when
several
languages are given but in the result is is up to the server to interpret it
and find the
best fit.

>> Does there have to be a script on the server to find the HTML files
>> in the right language?
>
>Not necessarily. Both Apache and CERN serves do this by configuration
>data.

Microsoft Internet Information Server allows very simple BASIC-like
scripting
in it's .ASP documents to inspect and react to all http header fields,
including
Accept-Language.

>> Once the HTML file in the right language is found, can the URLs
>> within that HTML file just point to other HTML files and have
>> the correct language selected? That is, can we have URLs without
>> language codes in them and have HTML files retrieved in the language
>> required by the user?
>
>The selection is normaly done on html file naming, not in the
>files themselves. Typical names are index.html.en or index.en.html
>I have not yet found a good and secure way to go forward once a language
>has been seleceted (if selection is used), other than replicate
>the files. But if you use automatic selection, you can stay
>with the automatic selection of the pages.

All agreed. If I may put another plug for Internet Information Server: with
.ASP you
could also dynamically respond with a portion of the current document. But I
agree
with Keld, normally you would choose or generate a document as a response,
naming
up to you.


>> Has anyone implemented a dynamic multilingual web site which does not
>> require the user to explicitly indicate the language as part of the URL?
>
>I have done a few:
>
>     www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc22/wg20 does english and french, without any
>                                 selection.
>     www.dkuug.dk/maits   does 10 languages without selection, but you
>                          can select them too.

Another one: http://home.microsoft.com/search/search.asp, reachable via the
"search"
button in IE4.

Chris..

Received on Friday, 18 July 1997 15:05:34 UTC