general/1180: Suggestion: Default language for LanNeg

[Jose KAHAN <ka...@w3.org>]

>Number:         1180
>Category:       general
>Synopsis:       Suggestion: Default language for LanNeg
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       non-critical
>Priority:       medium
>Responsible:    apache (Apache HTTP Project)
>State:          open
>Class:          change-request
>Submitter-Id:   apache
>Arrival-Date:   Mon Sep 29 15:10:03 1997
>Originator:     kahan@w3.org
>Organization:
apache
>Release:        1.2.4
>Environment:
SunOS 5.5 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-1
>Description:
A request for a default language directive
==========================================

Problem description
===================
Some months ago, Keio University (Japan), joined
the W3C staff. This brought up the problem of
multilingual documents; for example, their minutes
are published in both English and Japanese. 

While configuring our Apache server to do language
negotiation, we noticed that there's no default 
language. Documents must explicity include a
suffix stating the language in which they are
written. For example: 

              AddLanguage en en
              AddLanguage ja ja

and with documents mydoc.html.en, mydoc.html.ja.

In practice, this is really quite painful to set up.
We have thousands of documents already written in
English. Adding a suffix to them will probably take
too much time.

>How-To-Repeat:

>Fix:
SUGGESTION
==========

We would like Apache to have a default language
directive. Something like:

DefaultLanguage    en   

which will specify the language for those documents
not having an explicit language suffix. 

We believe this will greatly ease the reuse of
legacy data.

We hope you can consider adding this feature
in a future release of Apache.

Best greetings,

-Jose Kahan, on behalf of w3c's webmaster team
kahan@w3.org



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