148927 - Elicits foreign language page when expecting english

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Core :: Internationalization: Localization, defect)

Description

[robert guido]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0rc3)
Gecko/20020523
BuildID:    2002052306

Honest to god.  Perhaps some strange interaction with servlet or cgi generated
content generation, in any case when I go to the following address I get the
french version of the page.  Yet I get the to be expected english language
content when visiting with the older Netscape 4.7 browser.  Weird. 
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Using Mozilla, visit http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/
2. page displays in French!
3. Using Netscape 4.7 or other browser visit the same address,
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/
4. page displays in English!

Actual Results:  Mozilla receives the page in French whereas older browser
receives the page content in English!

Expected Results:  Gotten english content back -- 

This is beyond my art to analyze -- I assume that Mozilla is being identified as
a french language client by the content generator in the case of this particular
address, though addresses on the same server see and generate for the english
language (except for a very similar page on the same site:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/ which also generates french language content.

Comment 1

[gavin long]

WFM, winXP, 1.0.0 branch, 2002060106

Reporter, what are your settings under edit->preferences->navigator->languages ?

Comment 2

[Yuying Long]

Works for me on WinXP / 06-03 branch build.

Please compare the default language and encoding setting in preferences between
mozilla and N4.7x.

Comment 3

[robert guido]

Sorry for the first botched reply, if you received  it at all.  
To answer your questions completely, 
Mozilla language settings IN order of preference:

English/United Stated [en-us]
French [fr]
Italian [it]
Chinese [zh]
Spanish [es]
German [de]
English [en]
Danish [da]

Whereas Netscape 4.7 was set to 
1. English [EN] 
only

-Robert

Comment 4

[robert guido]

Attachment: Browser display with Language Prefs displayed too.

Here's what I see
-Robert

Comment 5

[robert guido]

When I moved the generic english [en] option up the list into second place after 
[en-us] and reloaded the browser it displayed english content correctly.  I 
suspect this is not Mozilla's problem, but Apache's.   Opinions please, if I 
should report this as an Apache bug, since I presume apache.com uses it's own 
server.  Unless this might be desirable behavior in some case that I cannot 
fathom.

Comment 6

[Yuying Long]

For Netscape 7.0(I think mozilla too) the default accept language are:
English/United Stated [en-us]
English [en]

So it won't encount this problem unless manually change the accept language
setting by user.  I assume it's not a bug for us.

Comment 7

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

> When I moved the generic english [en] option up
> the list into second place after 
> [en-us] and reloaded the browser it displayed english
> content correctly.  I 
> suspect this is not Mozilla's problem, but Apache's.

No, it's your problem. Both Mozilla and Apache is behaving correctly. If the browser sends 'en-US', this should *not* match 'en' on the server. But if the browser send 'en', this should match 'en-US' on the server. Apache correctly supports this. See the HTTP 1.1 specification
<URL: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.4 >:

  A language-range matches a language-tag if it exactly equals
  the tag, or if it exactly equals a prefix of the tag such that
  the first tag character following the prefix is "-". The
  special range "*", if present in the Accept-Language field,
  matches every tag not matched by any other range present in the
  Accept-Language field. 

But it *is* recommended that the browser automatically insert 'en' if the user inserts 'en-US' (similarly for other languages of course).

      Note: When making the choice of linguistic preference available to
      the user, we remind implementors of  the fact that users are not
      familiar with the details of language matching as described above,
      and should provide appropriate guidance. As an example, users
      might assume that on selecting "en-gb", they will be served any
      kind of English document if British English is not available. A
      user agent might suggest in such a case to add "en" to get the
      best matching behavior. [ibid.]

Marking as invalid.

You are welcome to open a new bug on automatically inserting 'xx' when 'xx-yy' is chosen in the language list.

Comment 8

[Yuying Long]

Verified as such.