Re: i18n help: Content negotiation?

["Vincent van Adrighem" <V vanAdrighem dirck mine nu>]

> There are a variety of degrees of language selection for a web site:
>
> 1) None, you get the language the site is in.  For sites that serve a
> particular, limited market, or for which translation is too expensive,
> this is a viable option.
> 2) Manual language selection.  At some point you can pick your language
> and the site honors your selection.  Cookies are the obvious mechanism
> for this.  It puts more of a burden on the server.
> 3) Content negotiation.  This requires that the user's browser supports
> it, and that the server does.  These days, that isn't a huge burden.
> It may not offer non-default languages to wget and robots.
> 4) Content negotiation with manual overriding, which is what we are
> discussing.  It is obviously possible.  It can create some interesting
> situations.  For example, I get different languages from SourceForge
> depending on whether I am logged in.  Obviously, it is possible to do
> it, and do it pretty well.  But as you have pointed out, there is a
> price to be paid by the server.

Debian.org seems to do both. I can set the language from within my browser.
Content-negotiation selects the right one for me. But if you look at the
bottom of the page, you can see that you have a choice, but you'd have to
select this on every page...not very handy. Maybe content negotiation is the
best way. You can change the settings yourself if you want to.

Just my EUR 0.02

Vincent