Re: Language tag education and negotiation

As far as I know, the most anyone does with the q values is to reorder the
list, and then the list is just walked through serially.

Mark

On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 10:45 AM, Asmus Freytag <asmusf@ix.netcom.com>
wrote:

>
> On 4/29/2008 10:25 PM, Martin Duerst wrote:
>
> > 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).
> >
> >
> I knew about q-values on the user side, but it would be their use on the
> server side that would allow support for the kind of scenario I had in mind.
> This leads to further questions. Are there any servers that support the q
> values? How does one set things up so a server can issue the correct q
> value?  And finally, is there an agreed upon convention on how to use such
> values?
>
> It would take positive answers on all three of these to make it possible
> to actually utilize them.
>
> Do the q values of sender and recipient get multiplied before comparison,
> or how does this work?
>
> > 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.
> >
> >
> Especially as browsers don't seem to allow several languages of equal
> status, nor large gaps. For example, assume the 'real' q values in your
> example were
>
>        en, ja;q=0.9, de;q=0.4, fr;q=0.3
>
> I would expect that such a user  might prefer a translation to 'en' of
>  some 'fr' or 'de' document over the original, but would continue to prefer
> a 'de' over a 'fr' version of any document.
>
> With correctly assigned q-values, and your convention of 0.5 for
> translation (and assuming multiplied values) this would work as intended. An
> 'en' or even 'ja' translation would trump an original in the languages with
> lesser preference. However, in the original scheme (fixed .1 offsets), you'd
> always get the original., even if they are in languages that, for the user
> in our example, might constitute languages of last resort.
>
> Seems like this subject could use some of the educational effort that Leif
> was asking for.
>
> A./
>
>
> > Regards,   Martin.
> >
> >
> >
> > #-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
> > #-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>


-- 
Mark