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Comment by mooism2 | Hacker News Reader

> If you don’t provide a language in your URL, you are implicitly sending the message that the documentation will never be translated.

RIP Accept-Language.

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A good host will redirect to the proper version of the docs when presented with a root URL, but how do you link someone to a specific language, if the Accept-Language is the canonical source for this information?

Wouldn't the use case be just "link to the right spot in the docs" and the user's client requests the appropriate language automagically? That way the link is valid for everyone, and it shows each their preferred language.

If I'm reading something in language A which deep links me to some documentation, I think it's quite likely that I want to see it in language A, not language B which happens to be my machine's native language.

For example recently I was linked to a Microsoft page via a comment, but it rendered in Japanese, which was a pain to me because I was looking for a specific citation in English. I had to switch language then dig through the site to get back the text the comment author was talking about.

If sites actually respected accept-language, I think this UI problem would be fixed by browsers in short order (change accept-language and reload)

No. I read multiple languages. Maybe my friend wants me to explain something in the docs they are reading - should I need to change my browser language to check it for him? I want to look something up from a university computer where I am studying in France - I can never see the docs in my native language from a public computer? I want to look something up on my friends laptop - it has to be in his preferred language?

It is nice to try and help a user, but you should always let them override your language decision.

Wouldn't it be better for someone to share a link (potentially in a different language) and the recipient sees it in their own language?

That said, language prefixes should still exist, for debugging if nothing else.

Automatically selecting a language based on the Accept-Language header value can be a nice feature but isn't a universal solution, and there are reasons to not do it. As another commented noted, it can be helpful to have the desired language specified via the URL for bookmarking and permalink reasons. Another problem is that some users don't know how to configure their browsers to declare a preferred language. Another problem is that some users do not have a single preferred language, and may prefer one language for certain contexts and another language for others. For such users, it's preferable to simply pick the language that they want from the site's UI.

Some sites automatically choose a language based on the client's location, and for similar reasons, this can be more annoying than helpful to certain users.

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