Re: #428 Accept-Language ordering for identical qvalues

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

On 2013-01-24 06:40, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> On Jan 23, 2013, at 5:17 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
>
>> So, does anyone have an issue with making ordering significant when there's no qvalue for *all* headers that use qvalues?
>>
>> Roy, I'm interpreting your answer as "we don't do anything with this information today," but as per below I don't think this stops us from defining it that way.
>
> Sorry, I wasn't clear.  There is no code out there today that would
> correspond to such a change.  I don't like making changes to HTTP
> just for the sake of imaginary consistency of definitions.
> Making them for the sake of consistency with implementations is fine.
>
> If it is a choice, I'd rather remove the line from Accept-Language
> than introduce new (unproven) things to Accept.
> ...

+1

In the meantime I had another look at RFC 4647:

> 2.3. The Language Priority List
>
>
>    A user's language preferences will often need to specify more than
>    one language range, and thus users often need to specify a
>    prioritized list of language ranges in order to best reflect their
>    language preferences.  This is especially true for speakers of
>    minority languages.  A speaker of Breton in France, for example, can
>    specify "br" followed by "fr", meaning that if Breton is available,
>    it is preferred, but otherwise French is the best alternative.  It
>    can get more complex: a different user might want to fall back from
>    Skolt Sami to Northern Sami to Finnish.
>
>    A "language priority list" is a prioritized or weighted list of
>    language ranges.  One well-known example of such a list is the
>    "Accept-Language" header defined in RFC 2616 [RFC2616] (see Section
>    14.4) and RFC 3282 [RFC3282].
>
>    The various matching operations described in this document include
>    considerations for using a language priority list.  This document
>    does not define the syntax for a language priority list; defining
>    such a syntax is the responsibility of the protocol, application, or
>    specification that uses it.  When given as examples in this document,
>    language priority lists will be shown as a quoted sequence of ranges
>    separated by commas, like this: "en, fr, zh-Hant" (which is read
>    "English before French before Chinese as written in the Traditional
>    script").
>
>    A simple list of ranges is considered to be in descending order of
>    priority.  Other language priority lists provide "quality weights"
>    for the language ranges in order to specify the relative priority of
>    the user's language preferences.  An example of this is the use of
>    "q" values in the syntax of the "Accept-Language" header (defined in
>    [RFC2616], Section 14.4, and [RFC3282]).


So in fact what the spec used to say is indeed consistent with 4647; 
there is no consistency problem that needs to be solved.

Best regards, Julian