Because of a decison taken by Microsoft many web sites that appears in a user’s prefered language will suddenly stop working if the site uses content language negotiation.

They have abused the language infomrmation to make it easier for web applications to recognise location of users.

The fault applies to almost all languages.

As an example,

Essentially, if you are in Mexico, IE 7 will set your only language to Mexican Spanish, in France you would get French from France. Many sites that use language negotiation for to reach generic Spanish or French pages, will suddenly provide their default (commonly English) page instead.

Victims sites of this decision include the World Wide Web Consortium site w3.org

See Richard Ishida’s blog for some more information.

A simple fix would have been to provide both the fully localised language descriptor (e.g. en-US and the generic on e.g. en).



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