Language tag education and negotiation

Technically, when a 'en-GB' tagged file gets acceped by a browser 
preferring 'en' tags, then the magic must be happening inside the Web 
browser.

So, speaking about eudcation: where shall the education take place, if 
we want that 'nn' tagged files shall be served to a browser preferring 
'no'? Is it not the User Agents that needs to learn?

Ok, so we agree that for Norwegian, 'no' is the problem. But then it 
seems to me that it is in the *web browsers* that it ought to be close 
to impossible to select 'no' as preferred language tag.

In order to satisfy Norwegians, a browser - or any datasystem - should 
only have two, mutually exclusive, options: Nynorsk preference or Bokmål 
preference. (In OS X I must select both, to be safe ...)

The Nynorsk order of preferences should be nn,no,nb.
The Bokmål order of preferences should be nb,no,nn

Ha, perhaps we should even be more drastic and have this order of 
preference:

    Nynorsk profile: nn,nb,no
    Bokmål profile: nb,nn,no

Effectively, for the Nynorsk user, both 'nb' and 'no' would map to 'nn'. 
Whereas 'nn' and 'no would map to 'nb' for the Bokmål user.

In order to generalise so it is useful not only for the Norwegian 
situation, I think that for instance the way Firefox lets me choose 
language is meaningless. The maningful thing would be to be able to 
select Nynorsk, and be done with that, knowing that I then would get 
both nn,nb,no in one chunch and in that order. In addition I should 
offered the option to disable e.g. 'no' and 'nb' fromt the Nynorsk profile.

Likewise, there should be one Albanian profile, which should enable 
support for all Alabanian languages. One sould the be able to deselect 
those Alabinan dialacts one does not understand/care about. Thus 
Arbëreshë Albanian users preferring Italian as fallback should be 
catered for.

It should be possible to enable more than one language profiles at once, 
for instance Albanian and Italian. Or English and Bokmål.

Think about how the Character Encoding menus works: They gather related 
charsets under common headings: Cyrillic encodings, Western Europan 
encodings etc.
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Saturday, 26 April 2008 05:36:41 UTC