[Catalyst] Multi-language and REST

[Ashley]

On Apr 25, 2008, at 10:28 AM, Christopher H. Laco wrote:
> If changing Accept-Language is too much, (or people want to view a  
> language other than their native), then look at language= in the  
> query params first..if it's empty...honor Accept-Language... rather  
> than forcing /<lang>/ at the front of all urls.

I like the idea (and you could even cookie language prefs instead of  
a query string solution which would be more expensive/complex with  
the URI rewrites) but giving up a large chunk of one's search engine  
results for a more purist interface is a pretty high price. As of  
last year (haven't checked recently) the googlebot couldn't even  
correctly index pages served as application/xhtml. Some bots might do  
the right thing with headers for their target language base(s) but I  
doubt it's many, if even a minority, of them yet.

It's not a transport issue (like HTML/PDF/JSON/XML/etc) which makes  
perfect sense for header control because the clients and client-side  
stuff is being written now in tandem, it's different content and the  
target clients are laden with legacy behavior. I like PUT and DELETE  
too but I'm not going to abandon POST as their stand-in (or fall- 
back) any time soon.