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LCIDs in the URI remove ambiguity about which language to serve (do you use Accept-Language? Or IP sniffing? Or user prefs in cookies?), they remove ambiguity about which storefront to show for a market and - most importantly - they make alternate language/markets indexable by search engines because each has a distinct URI. Why are Apple, IBM, Amazon, Google doing it if it's such a terrible design? http://www.ibm.com…
Accept-Language is clearly the correct solution. It's easy to set in browsers (at least it is in Opera, if it's not in some other browser then I contend that's a UI bug), and OEMs should set it to a sane default for the region in which the browser is distributed. The indexability is an interesting argument, but my response is that there should be a standard mechanism to query, via HTTP OPTIONS, in which languages a r…
For example, maybe that latest product announcement hasn't been translated to French yet. If I send a product list URL to my french-speaking buddy, should the product disappear from the product list?