310028 - enable "mt" (Maltese)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Internationalization, defect)

Description

[Ramon Casha]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050717 Firefox/1.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050717 Firefox/1.0.6

The language list in Preferences;Advanced;General;Languages, which depends on
res/languages.properties must contain all languages, or else provide a way for
users to type in their own language code. Currently, Firefox needlessly prevents
the user from seeing webpages in many languages.

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=310025 (it was previously filed
under Firefox itself)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Steffen Wilberg]

The reporter really wants "mt" to be enabled (see bug 269437, bug 310025).

Comment 2

[Ramon Casha]

That's my personal reason yes, but is there any good reason to prevent the
display of websites in any of those other languages? I think this is a general
issue, not specifically for the Maltese language.

Comment 3

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

I doubt if there is anyone still active who has detailed knowledge of the
history of why various languages have the accept=false property. Bug 62578
comment 8 and bug 62579 comment 9 provide a terse summary, and Jungshik made a
round of changes in bug 232487. If I had but world enough and time, I would be
happy to go through the entire list and review all the current disabled
languages, but as things are, it's only practical to review and enable languages
one by one as they are requested.

As for Maltese specifically, I don't see any reason not to enable it. It uses
the Latin (ASCII) alphabet with a few characters in the "Latin Extended A" range
and to the best of my knowledge we should be able to display all pages in
Maltese perfectly.

Comment 4

[Ramon Casha]

The entire Maltese alphabet is contained in ISO Latin-3 but the vast majority of
Maltese websites use UTF-8. 

I wonder whether bug 62579 comment 9 makes sense any more though. More and more
websites use utf-8 and the browser does not need to know anything at all about
the language being used.

Comment 5

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Attachment: Enable Maltese

All Maltese characters are in Latin3, so I gave it the x-western langGroup like
Esperanto.

Comment 6

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

(In reply to comment #4)
> I wonder whether bug 62579 comment 9 makes sense any more though. More and more
> websites use utf-8 and the browser does not need to know anything at all about
> the language being used.

Let's discuss the general issue in bug 310025, which I'll reopen.

Comment 7

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Ramon, can you point me to a website that serves content in Maltese when the
browser sends "mt" in the Accept-Language header?

Comment 8

[Jungshik Shin]

Comment on attachment 197523 [details] [diff] [review]
Enable Maltese

r=jshin

Comment 9

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Checked in.

Comment 10

[Steffen Wilberg]

Comment on attachment 197523 [details] [diff] [review]
Enable Maltese

This has "baked" on trunk since November 2005. Can we take it on the 1.8 branch? No l10n impact.

Comment 11

[Steffen Wilberg]

Comment on attachment 197523 [details] [diff] [review]
Enable Maltese

Actually, there have been quite a few changes made on trunk but not branch. We need to decide if and what to take on the branch.