Use browser's language settings

[Ben]

Did you ever thought of using the lenguage variable you get from the browser ? I just don't understand why would the site administrator decide for me in which language I want to see the hatta parts of the website.

[sheep]

Yes, indeed, I have thought about it. And I decided against, for several reasons:

• a wiki is in a single language, there has been some experiments with multilingual wikis, but I still have to see at least one success
• Hatta relies on http caching for its speed -- this means I can't afford to generate page each request for every user specially
• gettext is not really convenient for swicthing languages every request
• a wiki is for collaboration, and you can't collaborate without understanding each other's language -- this means you need at least one common languge, that's what the wiki should use
• the content is not translated, so why should the interface be? a mess of mixed languages on the screen is confusing
• you don't really want to invite people who don't understand what's in your wiki, but understand how to edit it
• if I added translated pages, the ones in less-used languages would quickly go out of date
• it invites a whole class of new feature requests that support translations and such. Hatta is not a tool for translation, I don't want to go there.

I hope not all of these points are silly.