Re: Newbie asks about multi-lingual website strategies

tedd wrote: > At 11:05 PM +0100 11/27/07, Jochem Maas wrote: >> tedd wrote: >> >> > If it were me, I wouldn't use any problematic browser detects schemes >>> (they don't work) or any of that high-thought stuff -- it's beyond me. >> >> whether it's beyond you or not only you can judge, but I disagree that >> it's >> problematic. I should note that I recommend using browser language >> preference >> detection (as per my previous post) as a means to initially select a >> [hopefully] >> suitable language BUT that this should be done in addition to offer >> the user >> an explicit mechanism for language selection. > > My "beyond me" statement was meant in jest, but browser sniffing is > notorious for being inaccurate and the practice is highly controversial. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_sniffing Sorry Tedd, but I'm not sure where the browser sniffing stuff came in. IE and FF both offer a UI to input the user's preferred language, it's an HTTP standard thing and nothign to do with user agents string parsing. It uses the Accept-Language header sent with http requests to detect the language. It's quite standard but problems usually crop up in e.g. Australia and the UK where a lot of people leave the default en-US language when en-GB or en-AU would be better. Again it's not infallible but it's a fairly good starting point. Another approach would be to use a geoip database and try and look up the users IP address but, if anything, I'd say that is even less accurate than the above. Col