Thursday, October 30th, 2008
Category: JSON
http://langdetect.appspot.com/?callback=setLanguage
This will return something like:
setLanguage({“languages”: ['en-us', 'en']});
Ben created a nice little sample that shows you content in the language you desire using the AJAX Language API.
Caching and dynamic views
My client does not want to change his cache settings on IE and I'm trying to figure out a way to dynamically update a view each time it is visited. I...
JQuery Function Not Defined?
In Episode 25, we chat about IE 8, standards, Acid3, server side JavaScript, and more.
Who are the ajaxians? Find out.
Please contact us at . We would love to hear about any news that we could put up here.
We have individual blogs too:
There’s been a discussion in the WHATWG about adding the XMLHttpRequest interface to the HTMLDocument.
http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-October/016922.html
http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-October/016948.html
What follows is something I just posted there in response to this post:
[The Language JSONP Service] seems like a terrible workaround since the Accept-Language header is sent from the same browser that the script is running in; a script shouldn’t have to make an HTTP request just to find out what the browser’s request headers are.
Therefore, I propose that in addition to implementing on HTMLDocument the XMLHttpRequest interface subset I initially suggested, I see that it would also be very useful for a script to obtain the request headers that were sent which resulted in the current document as the response. The current version of XMLHttpRequest hints to a future version including a getRequestHeader() method, a method which would complement getResponseHeader(); there could also be a getAllRequestHeaders() method that would correspond to the existing getAllResponseHeaders() method. (Obviously it would not make sense to implement the setRequestHeader() method.)
If these two methods ( getRequestHeader() and getAllRequestHeaders() ) were implemented, then there would be no need for a “Language JSONP Service” because there would be a better way to get the same result synchronously without any HTTP request, for example: document.getRequestHeader(‘Accept-Language’)
I feel I should clarify: by “terrible” I don’t mean to say that this app isn’t clever; it is very useful. But its existence highlights a deficiency in the state of scripting in the browser.
For the record, I just posted an idea on how to use it with GWT to automatically choose the appropriate locale for your application:
http://groups.google.fr/group/Google-Web-Toolkit/msg/e8ca2612aa72cfed
Maybe someone could test it and report how well/bad it actually works ;-)
I’m mulling over an OSS project to provide a Google Apps API that identifies the language of some sample text, or the text of the page on a given URI.
If anyone would particularly like to see that drop me a comment here or on my blog. It’d be nice to have help but isn’t too big a project alone either.
The techniques involved are pretty well understood:
http://richmarr.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/language-detection-using-trigrams/
It’s also a cut-n-paste problem in the Java world, but it’d be nice to have a funky open API on Appspot:
http://richmarr.wordpress.com/2008/10/24/creating-a-language-detection-api-in-30-minutes/
Doesn’t this accomplish the same thing without an HTTP request:
var language = navigator.language || navigator.userLanguage;
Is there a difference?
@westonruter
I couldn’t agree more. I created it because of the complete deficiency in client-side language detection which should be functional.
@kriszyp
There are a few properties that can tell you the language in the navigator object. I did a lot of testing and couldn’t find a way to rely on them cross-browser. Go try it out and you’ll see that when you change your language, your navigator.language || navigator.userLanguage || navigator.systemLanguage || navigator.userAgent || navigator.browserLanguage don’t necessarily change. Maybe someone has a good client side technique for this, but I did some quick browsing through Dojo & jQuery and didn’t find any client side browser language detect (correct me if I’m wrong).
@westonruter
BTW, before creating this API I was digging around for hacks to find the language and one of the things I was hoping for was exactly what you said:
getRequestHeader() / getAllRequestHeaders()