Re: www.nl.debian.org: language problems
On Thu, May 27, 1999 at 05:47:29PM +0200, Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote:
> People using www.nl.debian.org with MSIE 5 are complaining about seeing
> the pages in _Japanese_. www.debian.org is okay, but www.uk.debian.org
> shows the pages in German for MSIE 5 users ? :/
>
> Anybody have a clue what is going on?
>
> In the srm.conf for www.nl.debian.org I have:
>
> LanguagePriority en en-GB en-US br ch da de dk el es fi fr hr it ja ko
> pl pt sv zh-cn zh-tw
>
Try taking out the en-GB and en-US entries. I suggested putting them in,
but later asked the web mirrors to remove them since they may be causing
problems (they shouldn't, but getting the pages working properly is
our primary concern here). If that isn't the problem, then I don't
know what is going on. Debugging this is rather time consuming (and
difficult without access to the problem browser, IE). I'd rather not
spend any more time on it.
> Another strange thing is that by default apache seems to serve the pages
> in Italian, if Accept-Language is set to "*" :
>
There is a bug filed against apache (upstream) about this. It is
really a bug with browsers since the reading the http spec precludes
such a meaningless entry (from rfc2068):
Note: As intelligibility is highly dependent on the individual
user, it is recommended that client applications make the choice of
linguistic preference available to the user. If the choice is not
made available, then the Accept-Language header field must not be
given in the request.
My reading of this (and the author of apache's mod_negotiation) is that
a preference of 'any language' should be handled by not sending an
Accept-Language header. On the other hand, apache should work around
problems with stupid browsers.
BTW, the language chosen when an Accept-Language header is chosen, which
doesn't give a preferred version (a tie between all versions), is to
send the smallest file. If this is not the case, then send me mail
because this will tell me where things are going wrong.
This is the only outstanding problem I have been able to find with
apache's content negotiation. All the others have been fixed with
apache 1.3.6. Make sure you are using that version as there are
problems with all previous versions.
Jay Treacy
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