[db-wg] Status of the language: attribute

Jan-Erik,

On Wed, 20 Mar 2013 11:04:47 +0200
Jan-Erik Eriksson <jee at alcom.ax> wrote:
> Our special situation as a Swedish speaking area with the country of
> Finland have and still are imposing great challenges for s in the
> on-line world. Typically web services, ads, media and other on-line
> content is presented to our users in the wrong language.

HTTP has had an "Accept-Language" option since HTTP/1.1, almost 14
years old now:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.4

It seems to be supported by all of the popular browsers, and presumably
is straightforward to use on the web server side.

Apparently this feature is not used?

The reason I bring this up is because it seems like a much, MUCH better
way of getting the correct language to the user. AIUI operating systems
already set this to the system language by default, but of course users
can tweak it.
 
> To solve these issues today the only way is to approach the presenter
> of that content, for instance Google, and lobby for them to handle
> this situation. As you all understand, this task is impossible
> considering the number of parties that we would need to contact.

Google in particular is well-known for being ridiculous regarding
localization. Anyone who has traveled has faced the annoyance of being
presented with a screen of text in a language (or even a character set)
that they can't read. For example, if I was to visit the Åland Islands
I would not want Finish or Swedish. :)

I guess my question is that if companies are going to ignore browser
settings - which have the actual user language information - does it
really make sense to add language information to IP databases?

Cheers,

--
Shane
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