Re: Language tag education and negotiation

At 12:40 08/04/27, Asmus Freytag wrote:
>
>On 4/25/2008 11:45 PM, Andrew Cunningham wrote:
>>
>>
>> basically no one size fits all, there needs ot be flexibility.
>>
>As long as we are discussing deficiencies of the language preference mechanism as currently implemented, here's another one:
>
>For people who are bi- or tri- lingual (in the case of mutually un-intelligible languages) there's another situation that can crop up, which is entirely not handled by the current scheme.

Actually, it IS handled by the current scheme, with what's called
q-values. Q-values are used to indicate relative preferences from
the client side, and relative quality on the server side. So a
server could give original documents a q value of 1.0, and translated
documents a q-value of e.g. 0.5 (q-values are always between 1.0 and
0.0).

q-values are sent by some browsers, which translate a preference
list of e.g. en, ja, de, fr into something like
   en, ja;q=0.9, de;q=0.8, fr;q=0.7
or so. Apache also understands them. But they are difficult to set
up, so they are not really used much.


Regards,   Martin.



#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp     

Received on Wednesday, 30 April 2008 05:28:00 UTC