Jan-Erik, On Wed, 20 Mar 2013 11:04:47 +0200 Jan-Erik Eriksson <jee@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