Subject: [Ltru] FW: I think IE7 is going to break language negotiation on many se rvers

From: "McDonald, Ira" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 14:30:48 -0700

Hi,

Richard Ishida just sent this note to W3C I18N list.

The complaint it makes is just shifting from 'fr' to
'fr-FR' (language/region) and doesn't even include a
script subtag.

Peter Constable - is this a real or imaginary problem?

[copied Richard, because I'm not sure he's subscribed
to LTRU]

Cheers,
- Ira

Ira McDonald (Musician / Software Architect)
Blue Roof Music / High North Inc
PO Box 221  Grand Marais, MI  49839
phone: +1-906-494-2434
email: [email-masked]

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked]
[mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Richard Ishida
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2006 11:25 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: I think IE7 is going to break language negotiation on many
servers

FYI

http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/?p=68

"The IE7 blog just announced Microsoft's intention to change the way browser
preferences for Accept-language are set up by default. Basically your
preferences will no longer, by default, be set to fr if you’re French, but
to fr-FR instead, ie. your locale as determined by Windows settings.

I think this is going to cause major problems with content negotiation on
the Web.

To give a practical example: ..."

============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/

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---

From: Addison Phillips <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 17:33:31 -0700

Yes, he's right, systems based on Basic Filtering, such as Apache, will 
not find the same content they used to find. This is why many of us who 
have implemented language negotiation schemes have based ours on the 
Lookup scheme. The Apache approach is difficult to manage for a large 
web property (it relies on file suffixes) and produces problematic 
behavior (such as not finding French when I ask for 'fr-FR', eh?)

The former practice also means that less specific information was 
available from the browser than is actually available. It is good to 
know if your user prefers French or Canadian usage!

I should note: I have long complained about how the W3C server's 
language negotiation is set up. It never seems to "language negotiate" 
with me unless I specifically set the right (really short) tag is at the 
top of my list. If that's the behavior we're breaking, I'm all for it.

Addison

-- 
Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Yahoo! Inc.

Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.

---

From: Peter Constable <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 21:36:02 -0700

I don't know anything about what IE7 is doing, but I've passed this on to someone dealing with globalization issues in IE and he's looking into it.

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: McDonald, Ira [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 18, 2006 2:31 PM
To: [email-masked]
Cc: Peter Constable; 'Richard Ishida'
Subject: FW: I think IE7 is going to break language negotiation on many servers

Hi,

Cheers,
- Ira

-----Original Message-----

FYI

============
Richard Ishida

---

From: "Jukka K. Korpela" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 09:53:03 +0300 (EEST)

> 'fr-FR' (language/region) and doesn't even include a

That's not such a big change, given the fact that web browsers already so 
often send _only_ a language variant (such as 'en-US') in the 
Accept-Language header. So this is something that authors (who are willing 
to language-negotiate) have had to face for a long time.

Quoting "Language Negotiation Notes" by Alan J. Flavell:

"However, the big surprise was the overwhelming proportion of requests 
whose language preferences contained only "en-us": the great majority of 
these requests were coming from MSIE versions, although some other 
browsers (Netscape6, even Lynx) were represented in small numbers."
    http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/lang-neg.html

Moreover, the following warning in the HTTP/1.1 protocol (RFC 2616) has 
generally been ignored:

       Note: When making the choice of linguistic preference available to
       the user, we remind implementors of  the fact that users are not
       familiar with the details of language matching as described above,
       and should provide appropriate guidance. As an example, users
       might assume that on selecting "en-gb", they will be served any
       kind of English document if British English is not available. A
       user agent might suggest in such a case to add "en" to get the
       best matching behavior.

So authors who try to set up language negotiation in a way that works
have had to do things like implying "en" from the presence of "en-gb", 
even though this violates the HTTP/1.1 protocol.

The basic problem is that browsers have language preferences _at all_ as 
silent defaults. The preferences are typically taken from the browser's 
own interface language (setting them, for example, to 'en' or even 'en-US'
because the user is using an English-language version - just because it's 
the only one available for the _newest_ version of the browser). The 
preferences should, of course, be based on information that the _user_ has 
been prompted to specify when the browser is being installed or used for 
the first time.

Before this practical problem can be solved, language negotiation on 
the web is mostly just an academic exercise.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/