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Comment by derf_ | Hacker News Reader

My favorite is the sites who do parse Accept-Languages, but then pick the last one in the list instead of the first. I have mine in rough order of my competence in them, which gets me my least-competent language on some sites even when my most-competent is supported.

I get a kick out of it when I see it, because you can understand how it happens. "Well, at least you tried."

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It is wrong to blame the server here. For better results in content-negotiation, a user-agent should allow you to assign numeric weights instead of just a list (implying the same level of preference). Example:

    Accept-Language: en;q=0.7,pt;q=0.3

If you already send something similar to this, and the server gets it wrong, then this is an outright bug, the software or its operator is out of compliance with HTTP.

This parameter, at first glance, appears to be used as numeric weights for automatic translations served by default, what turns browsing very uncomfortable (wrong translations, distorted texts).

Ie. Google, Youtube, Reddit.

Automatic translations should never be served by default, but only be loaded if the user requests it. The classical "do you want translate".

It was and still is used for manually translated text, among other things. Does this help you get the full picture?

I don't need help, I'm criticising the use of the automatic translations served by default, and that are being used the weights of this parameter to do it.

The full picture? The weights seem to be more useful for fingerprinting and perhaps for server SEO than to help the users. Users who in the end will have to give the same weight to all the languages, or rewrite the outgoing headers, in order to be able to browse the Internet.

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