Accept my accept-language

111 点作者 hc5大约 11 年前

17 条评论

Udo大约 11 年前

Pretty much every major site will completely ignore not only your browser's language settings but also onsite user account settings and other desperate attempts at selecting the language. The only thing that matters is your IP address.For example, accessing Google: my browser is set to accept English only. I'm entering the English URL. In my account settings I periodically reset everything I can find to English (settings apparently decay, too). Google knows I want the English version. Yet, they still give me the interface in whatever language my IP address comes from. And not only the UI, search results as well.Recently it's gotten even worse than that: Google figured out I'm actually German, so they start defaulting to German more often now - ignoring everything else. At least with the IP address-based routing it was impersonal.I happened to be in Sweden when I linked my Facebook calendar to my Google calendar. Ever since that day, my friends' birthdays are given to me in Swedish. Facebook knows I want English, yet for some reason this is how it's got to be.The same abuse is apparently considered best practice at new startups as well: recently I was testing a browser game for an acquaintance who's on their development team. Because I was in Portugal at the time, I of course got the site in Portuguese. Manually switching that to English, the game still started up in Portuguese. It's been doing that ever since. Every email I get from that company is in Portuguese, too, even though I tried everything I could to set my language to English.It's a source of endless frustration, maybe even a hostile act. They're effectively saying "Your choices don't matter, we know what's best for you. You're from country X, so you _must_ speak Xish. People are on the internet to enjoy regional separation. Really, it's best."

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rwg大约 11 年前

You probably want something like "en-US,en;q=0.9,ko;q=0.8". (Note the addition of "en" between "en-US" and "ko".) Some quick testing with Firefox, which lets you directly alter the Accept-Language: header in requests in about:config, shows that fedoraproject.org has "en" versions of resources but not "en-US" versions. Since your Accept-Language: header only lists "en-US", "ko" ends up being selected.EDIT: I just noticed your guesses at the bottom of the post. Your second guess is correct. See §14.4 of RFC 2616: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.

delroth大约 11 年前

I just fixed dolphin-emu.org, this was a bug in our code that would not detect en-US as being "compatible" with en. See <a href="https://github.com/dolphin-emu/www/commit/ddef974c6f601bc2dbbcc499c8990f4dd074615f" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dolphin-emu/www/commit/ddef974c6f601bc2db...</a>As a French guy leaving in the German part of Switzerland with Accept-Language configured to get English content, I'm kind of ashamed to have that kind of bug in my language detection code. I'm always complaining about other websites language detection, looks like I should have looked at my own code first!

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crazygringo大约 11 年前

Language choices are a mess. There can easily (and often) be conflicting data based on:- accept-language header- URL that includes language/region codes as a subdomain or part of the path- language preferences set in a cookie or account- IP region detectionIn the end, any website is trying to provide the right language most often for their users, and there are no easy answers. When I access webmail from an Internet cafe in China, I don't want the interface popping up in Chinese just because the browser's accept-language is configured for Chinese. Fortunately, it doesn't.Most web users have never even heard of accept-language, it's just automatically configured by whatever language their browser was installed in, which isn't always the language you want to be browsing in. (E.g. you bought your laptop overseas because it was cheaper, so it runs in English instead of your own language.) It's not a surprise that IP address detection provides the best default experience most of the time, which can then be overridden by URL or user choice, and that accept-language is fairly irrelevant.

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raving-richard大约 11 年前

Google is^H^Hwas* really bloody annoying when it comes to this. English (en-us and en) is the only language in my accept header. When I lived in Geneva though, Google always used to serve me pages in German (presumably Swiss-German). Gee, that's logical. (Geneva is a mainly French speaking city, though over 40% of the population is non-Swiss.)Where I live now is another French speaking area. I just checked and it seems they are no longer serving French pages to me. But they were even just one year ago. (I don't use Google by default, so I don't know when they changed.)Admittedly, that was an issue with geo-detecting rather than the website having bad language detection.* They seemed to have stopped.Air France is (though they have many faults) actually alright at detecting my language. And mostly gives me English pages...

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darklajid大约 11 年前

My accept header only contains en-US and en. I tend to get served German content (and Google's especially bad about this).Please, I hope someone hears your complains and starts fixing things. That issue is highly annoying..

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jtokoph大约 11 年前

> 1. the default quality value is being parsed wrong, and English is being assigned q=0 instead of q=1 or> 2. en-US doesn't match en and is being bypassedOr: 3. They are simply checking your IP address and not looking at your header at all.

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junto大约 11 年前

I have blogged about this several times. Google are one of the worst offenders. I'm not sure if it is insular non-travelled US developers with a deep love of IP-to-geolication databases, or an anally retentive legal department, but it really sucks as a user experience.From an advertising perspective this is a major market that is being overlooked, because guess what, I don't look at ads that much, but you can bet your bottom advertising dollar that I'm definitely not going to read it in a language that isn't my mother tongue.IP address != language preferenceIt is about time that developers got that through their thick skulls.Finally, over here in Europe we can live in whichever EU country we want to. This means that we can move countries easily. I've already been in four of them. I don't think I'm an edge case by any means. People migrate.

midas007大约 11 年前

I'm working on locale stuff for a Rails app right now (just updated the i18n_data in fact).The assumption will be that country is mostly orthognal to language b/c people are übermobile. Further, that the dialect of the language should not force assumptions of other preferences... only autodiscover initial settings as close to desired as possible. (Fuck, why isn't there a standard for this common, hard-to-manage shit the OS already knows.)i18n is taking up tons of time to get (mostly) right, but I believe it's one of those things not to botch because it's such a huge signal to everything else about your app.If I want to be the most obscure hipster paying in Lesotho Loti, read Catalonian, have a "," for thousands separator and use UTC tz, by Flying Spaghetti Monster that's what it's gonna allow.

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pytrin大约 11 年前

Those sites are not relying on accept-language, but rather on IP geolocation to select the default language. I sometimes use a non-US proxy when I'm feeling vigilant, and Google always uses the IP of the proxy to determine what language to serve me (even though my browser accept-language hasn't changed).

nemetroid大约 11 年前

I'm running an English version of Windows 7 in Sweden. The accept-language headers in each of my installed browsers are:* IE9: sv-SE* Firefox: en,sv;q=0.5* Chrome: en-US,en;q=0.8,sv;q=0.6I'm going to go ahead and suggest that the reason English comes before Swedish is due to my system language, and that Swedish otherwise would come first. The "users will have the wrong settings" argument seems moot to me.

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gioele大约 11 年前

To avoid such problems in Rack/Rails Ruby project I suggest the rack-i18n_best_langs gem (regardless of the name, it does not depend on the i18n gem) I wrote:<pre><code> https://github.com/gioele/rack-i18n_best_langs </code></pre> > Differently from other similar Rack middleware components, rack-i18n_best_langs returns a list of languages in order of guessed importance, not a single language.> Language discovery is done using three clues:> * the presences of language tags in paths (e.g. /service/warranty/ita),> * the content of the HTTP Accept-Language header,> * the content of the rack.i18n_best_langs cookie when set.

Aldo_MX大约 11 年前

Unrelated with the accept-language issue, but somehow related:I needed to create a yahoo account, and I registered it selecting the kimo.com domain (kimo.com is a Chinese domain owned by yahoo). Since the first moment I set my language preferences to English.No matter which yahoo service I'm visiting, I always get welcomed by at least the login prompt in Chinese, I can't really complain, because I was the one who looked for a rare domain, but it's an annoyance for me, because yahoo assumes that I understand Chinese because of the domain.

nraynaud大约 11 年前

There is also the problem of getting the original content, I speak 3 langages, I intend to read the original source if it's one of those language. I don't want unpaid-intern translation.MS C# documentation deserve a special kind of hell, because they detected I reverted the language to english ; and now they present me a special translation mode of their freaking doc where there are huge tooltip texts everywhere.

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pornel大约 11 年前

Sorry, when I implement language negotiation I interpret "en-US" as lack of preference.The problem is that en-US is the default and I can't tell difference between user not setting language and user choosing en-US.Add "en" or even "en-GB" to your Accept-Language header.

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petercooper大约 11 年前

accept-language is like any of 1000 other idealistic parts of Internet specs that has good intentions but is so poorly used (or misused) that almost no-one implements it correctly, instead simply doing the simplest thing that works best for 99% of the audience.

raverbashing大约 11 年前

If I access Google using and European IP it will show the Google page for the Country I am in, regardless of my accept-language(I don't have an accept-language for Dutch, Italian, German, French but in all these cases I was shown the local page)