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Comment by WesolyKubeczek | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard time remembering the last time I’ve seen a site using that header for its intended purpose…

All public-facing sites I've ever worked on, used that header for its intended purpose. Europe has a lot of different languages in a relatively small area, so if you want to do ecommerce there, you'll really need it.

I've worked on and written a few sites like that too, but in my experience quite a few larger sites use the IP address for this. It's pretty annoying if you don't speak the local language well or just prefer the English version. Google is a major "offender" for example, but there are many others too. PornHub even machine translates stuff.

Tell me about it, as a native English speaker living in Germany. This happens even when the website has an English language version. I don't understand how they think this is helpful. My browser literally told you the language I want to be served in its first header!

Related gripe: Twitter will only offer the report form (for e.g. a harmful tweet) inside Germany, in German. I do understand conversational German but not German legalese; I will not bother to select which exact subparagraph of the communications legislation the tweet violates, I will just close the tab and let someone else report it.

RE:Twitter, I suspect that's because Germans get a different report form than other visitors - Germany has some specific laws (e.g. NetzDG) that apply to visitors from Germany, rather than visitors who speak German.

Wgat's wrong with showing some flags? I speak a small language and regularly buy things from things in neighboring countries. But even when I don't speak that lanugage at all, I can just look for a british flag or a language dropdown or similar. I have no idea what language my browser reports and I hope it reprts a single "English" and no fallbacks (despite that not being my first language).

Which flag should you use for the English language?

Union Jack? English Flag? USA Flag? Some horrible hybrid between them?

None of them is a perfect fit. As a techie I'd say ISO codes ('en', 'en-gb', 'fr', 'de') but I'm not sure how much those are understood, and probably not so hot for non-latin scripts.

And it's not 1-1 the other way; there are many countries with more than 1 official language. The best way IMHO is a drop-down with the language name represented in its own language (e.g. "Deutche"), with the default based on the Accept-Language header.

What decides the accept-language header though? Where do modern browsers pick it from? The OS language?

At least in Firefox, it's in the browser settings, under General > Languages > Choose your preferred language for displaying pages > Choose...

This lets you specify an ordered list of whatever languages you prefer. If you haven't set it manually, usually it defaults to whatever your system language is.

It's configurable from within the browser, though it moves around a lot and has been getting hidden lately. I think default is based on the OS language, but of course that can vary between browsers and versions.

The union jack for en-GB, but I'd say the UK flag useful regardless. Even for selecting en-US! No one outside native english speaking countries really cares deeply about what way color is spelled in a web shop, and everyone recognizes the flag(s). Having a flag doesn't preclude showing "en" or "English" next to it either. But I wouldn't confuse users with full ISO codes like en-GB or en-US. Just "en" and it can be the natural en of the site location. Everyone expects en to be en-US for a US site.

Flags represent countries, not languages.

I always set it to US English because I don’t like translations, yet I pretty often get translations.

It's so standard in web frameworks and CMSes that you must see it in action every single day without realizing it, as long as the sites are using the built-in i18n capabilities - which in almost all cases they are. And in Apache/Nginx configs that involve header-based redirections to a local language domain/subdomain, same deal.

Plenty of sites do, at least in Europe.

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