Re: [Lynx-dev] Proposed patch to init preferred-doc-lang from LANG/LANGUAGE

[David Woolley]

Chuck Houpt wrote:
> preferred doc language would be "en,fr,de". Multi-lingual web sites (ex: 
> http://debian.org) use the setting to send the best matching language. 
> For example, if English isn't available, French would be sent.

The HTTP protocol gives weightings to each languages and the server can 
give weightings to the quality of the translation. E.g. in the case of 
the poor German translation, an honest web master could give the 
translation a 0.2 quality factor and the German user could give English 
a 0.5 quality factor.

For static web pages, at least, most web servers do implement this. 
Unfortunately mainstream browsers have dumbed this down and allocate 
arbitrary qualities based on the order of the language in the user's 
list.  I believe Lynx allows the actual HTTP header, with explicit 
quality factors, to be specified.