- From: André (小山) Schappo <A.Schappo@lboro.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 6 May 2009 13:55:48 +0100
- To: www-international@w3.org
On 30 Apr 2009, at 19:39, Ed Trager wrote: > > Another point I neglected to mention: In principle, it seems sensible > to look at the HTTP "Accept-Language" header and maybe also the > "navigator.language" (or IE equivalent) variable. If geolocation > tells you "France", but the "Accept-Language" list starts with > "Japanese", that seems informative : maybe the user prefers Japanese. > > The only problem --and I think it is a big problem-- is that *way* too > often "Accept-Language" and/or "navigator.language" just say "en-US" > -- which is much less informative. Even in the USA, if geolocation > says "USA" and "Accept-Language" says "en-US", the user still might > *actually* prefer Spanish -- but of course the user has no clue how to > set that preference in the browser. > > And if geolocation says something like "Bhutan" but Accept-Language > still says "en-US", well in that case "Accept-Language" is nearly > useless (see Chris Fynn's points about the lack of Dzonghka > localization on most computers in Bhutan in a related posting on the > Unicode.org mailing list a few weeks ago). > > So just because two items of data (geolocation + Accept-Language) are > in agreement that it is "English" does not, unfortunately, provide > confirmation that "English" is wanted. It is definitely not the same > as say, two pregnancy tests both saying that one is pregnant ... > > HTTP "Accept-Language" remains a conundrum -- I'm still not sure what > to do with it ... > > Best - Ed My thoughts are that, in general, Accept-Language should take precedence over geolocation. My reasoning being that if a user is savvy enough to set their preferred language for displaying pages then they do really want the pages in that language wherever in the world they are. If I were to set my browser to zh-CN then I would want my pages displayed in simplified chinese wherever I am in the World. André Schappo http://国际化域名.lboro.ac.uk/
Received on Wednesday, 6 May 2009 12:56:30 UTC