 When IE7 Going to be out ?
The IE7 blog just announced Microsoft’s intention to change the way browser preferences for Accept-language are set up by default. Basically your preferences will no longer, by default, be set to fr if you’re French, but to fr-FR instead, ie. your locale as determined by Windows settings.
I think this is going to cause major problems with content negotiation on the Web.
To give a practical example:
Set your language settings to just es-MX and/or es-ES and point your browser to this article on the W3C site (an article explaining how to set language preferences).
You’ll get back the English version, even though there’s a Spanish version there. Someone with es set in IE6, Opera or Firefox will see the Spanish version automatically – even if their preferences are es-MX then es.
This is down to the way language negotiation is done on the Apache server.
In the article linked to above we explain that “Some of the server-side language selection mechanisms require an exact match to the Accept-Language header. If a document on the server is tagged as fr (French) then a request for a document matching fr-CH (Swiss French) will fail. To ensure success you should configure your browser to request both fr-CH and fr.” |