Re: meta content-language

Richard Ishida 2008-08-18 16.48:

> Leif, I'm not sure that makes sense... The prompt for the content
> negotiation should come from the user agent, since it reflects the
> preferences of the user, not the language of a given page.  The user agent
> sends the user's preferences (or its defaults) via the Accept-Language HTTP
> field, and the server uses that information to do content negotiation (if
> enabled on the server). If the server finds a match, it returns meta
> information about the document it is serving in the Content-Language field
> of the HTTP header. 


I did not intend to propose a change in anything. I just wondered 
whether it could be tested whether servers actually read the META 
elements in order to present things as you said.

The trouble is that if you have 'page-english.html' and 
'page-german.html', and both of them contain <meta ... 
content="en, de">, then such a negotiaton would not work.

 

   [...]

>> Richard Ishida 2008-08-15 21.42:
>>>> From: Henri Sivonen [mailto:hsivonen@iki.fi]
>> 
>>>> What purpose does metadata serve if it isn't actionable?
>>>

>>> Metadata is actionable if some application is written to
>>> use it. It is not actionable if the information is not
>>> available.

>> 
>> Regarding the question of "actionable": Ideally, authors should be
>> able to add content-language information via the META tag, and
>> then experience that the web server - and the Web browser - use
>> this information to perform language negotiation.
>> 
>> Richard, you made many tests of how UAs react to language tagging:
>> Perhaps it is possible to make test case for what web servers and
>> browsers do with the content-langauage information with regard to
>> content negotiation

-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Tuesday, 19 August 2008 11:19:17 UTC