- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Mon, 31 May 2004 18:11:46 +0300 (EEST)
- To: www-validator-css@w3.org
On Mon, 31 May 2004, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote: > Your web browser sends information about > your language preferences to the web server and the Validator acts upon > that information. That's a good thing to do, and it's nice that W3C sets a good example. But "language negotiation", as it is called, should not be trusted upon as the sole means of serving different language variants. As this incident shows, even experienced users are unfamiliar with the issue, and e.g. the validator page does not seem to give _any_ hint about the availability of other language variants. (I don't even know whether there are other variants than English and French.) So any "negotiated" page should have explicit links to the other language variants. This is how things are normally handled, too, on the relatively few sites that currently deploy language negotiation. For some more arguments in favor of this, see http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/multi/2.html Even in situations where the user _has_ configured his browser(s) to reflect his actual language preferences, it can be useful to know that different variants exist. For example, I might know a little bit of English and a little bit of French and would then prefer seeing both versions to understand the content maximally. -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Monday, 31 May 2004 11:22:53 UTC