Comments on: Language JSONP Service

By: lisbakke

lisbakke — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:22:40 +0000

@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()

By: lisbakke

lisbakke — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:20:24 +0000

@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).

By: kriszyp

kriszyp — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:00:40 +0000

Doesn’t this accomplish the same thing without an HTTP request:
var language = navigator.language || navigator.userLanguage;
Is there a difference?

By: itchyrich

itchyrich — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 12:40:31 +0000

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/

By: tbroyer

tbroyer — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 09:08:23 +0000

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 ;-)

By: westonruter

westonruter — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 07:31:06 +0000

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.

By: westonruter

westonruter — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 07:27:43 +0000

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’)