[webkit-dev] exposing the value of Accept-Language via window.navigation.acceptLanguage ?

[Darin Fisher]

2009/7/22 Alexey Proskuryakov <ap at webkit.org>

>
> 22.07.2009, в 16:41, Jungshik Shin (신정식, 申政湜) написал(а):
>
>  Some web apps/widgets/browser extensions can also benefit from knowing
>> the ordered list of languages in Accept-Language.
>>
>
>
> I should note that Safari only sends one language. The reasons for this
> are:
> - protecting users' privacy, as a list of spoken languages can help
> identify a site visitor better than the primary preferred language;
> - improving Web compatibility, as servers happen to have most weird
> problems with complicated Accept-Language strings.


Firefox and Chrome send very similar A-L headers.  Given FF's marketshare,
I'm surprised you observed compat problems with doing the same.  Was that a
recent observation?  Can you provide more details about the issues you
observed?

It should be noted that normally people only have one value (or one family
of values: "en" and "en-US" for example) on the A-L list, and that they have
to configure their browser to advertise other languages.  I think that
addresses the privacy concerns, assuming suitable wording in the
configuration panel.

I think this is a valuable extension to window.navigator because it is not
revealing any additional information to the web app.  They can already get
this information by having a web server echo back the A-L header.  This is
just a short-cut convenience for use by web authors (avoiding a server round
trip).

-Darin



>
>
> So, the difference between Accept-Language and navigator.language is very
> minimal for us.
>
> 22.07.2009, в 20:21, Maciej Stachowiak написал(а):
>
>  * - Kind of off topic, but I found this incredibly frustrating recently
>> when traveling in countries where I did not know the native language.
>>
>
> Yes, this kind of auto-detection is quite frustrating, and it becomes even
> more frustrating when sites say "This content is not available in your
> country". This makes me very skeptical of any proposals that let sites get
> more information about users without their explicit consent.
>
> - WBR, Alexey Proskuryakov
>
>
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