[thelist] [language] Is it supported well?

Joshua Olson joshua at waetech.com
Sun Aug 3 22:42:42 CDT 2003


Hi gang,

I am exploring various ways that I can create a multi-lingual site.  It
occurred to me that some browsers (including IE/PC and Moz/PC) send
accept-language with the headers.  I thought it would be very kind to the
user to use that string as a default language selector for the site content.

I thought to myself "I bet all the big-boys already do this..."

So I changed my language to Spanish with German as a backup and went to
Microsoft.com, yahoo.com, google.com... None of them honored my language
choice in my browser.  I then cleared my cookies for google and then
reloaded it... my languages were then honored.  Way cool.

So, here are my questions:

1.  Are the language codes backed up by some extended ISO standard?  I found
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/ert/iso639.htm but it's doesn't appear to be the
same list as you find in IE/PC and Moz/PC. Those browsers not only include
just a subset of the languages, but also localizations of many languages
(example, en-jm for English/Jamaica).

2.  What is the browser support like for these headers?  Any major browser
not fully support these headers?

3.  Anybody have any negative sharable experiences with trying to use these
headers to automatically select a default language?

Thanks in advance.

<><><><><><><><><><>
Joshua Olson
Web Application Engineer
WAE Tech Inc.
http://www.waetech.com
706.210.0168



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