Re: Language tag education and negotiation

Nicolas Krebs 2008-04-28 19.46:
> >Through a friend, I just now became aware of a problem with mapping 'nb' 
> >to '.nb' on Apache. It turns out that the 'nb' MIME extension belongs to 
> >Mathematica [1].
>   

> This is a well know issue.

I don't think that the issue with .nb is well known. But, btw, I think 
it is strange that it is allowed to happen. This seems like an instanse 
where one standard (nearly) kills another one. (I am looking forward to 
the day when som app is is awarded 'en' as MIME extension.)

>  It is know[n] from year for other suffix, 
> including suffix far more used than Mathematica, 
> and language more used than Norwegian Bokmål : 
>   
> [...]
> You should be careful with a few extensions. For example, using the 
> ISO code for Polish, .pl, would confuse it with the extension typically 
> used to indicate Perl documents.
>   

Indeed, the Apache configuration files itself makes that comment - I am 
well aware of it. When I read Richard's text the other day, it looked at 
this point not very different from that inside Apache.

> You can avoid the issue by « put the .html extension last »
> (as wrote in the same section), thus having « example.en.html »
> and so on (idem). 
>   

I had overlooked that. But then you must, as well, avoid URLs ending 
with .html, since index.html will not match index.en.html [unless you do 
something extra]. (One should, anyhow, use cool URIs, but doing so 
requires more effort.)

> And for your main issue (educate users of language tag
> and make them read the f* manual),

Regarding the fine manual, the Apache default installation is as well a 
source for information about how things should work. To avoid that 
"Apache's deeds speaks louder than its fine manual", it seems the 
following should be corrected:

Apache contains a lot of index files in the Apache root folder. And they 
all looks like index.html.fr, index.html.en, index.html.de etc ... It 
seems to me that if the way Richard proposes it is the best (and I am 
close to think that it ought to be, having struggeled a bit with placing 
the language tags as end suffix), then Apache should also follow the 
same rule, and change them to index.en.html, index.fr.html etc.

>  you can try (showing them)
> http://www.langtag.net/registries/registry-html/language/no.html
> http://www.langtag.net/registries/registry-html/language/nb.html
> http://www.langtag.net/registries/registry-html/language/nn.htm

Those pages was not so informative, but I am convinced that langtag.net 
is well worth reading.
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Monday, 28 April 2008 18:35:01 UTC