For website that need to deal with several interface languages, depending of the audience, we need to be able to choose between
1 - same URL / domain but languages determined by browser preference and after cookies, and the language can be "forced" using a dedicated URL (like example.com/language/change-to/fr even if my browser is english and my previous cookies/sessions are saying 'chinese'
2 - language in the URL , URL > cookies, for website like wikipedia where the inner content can really be different from one language to another and where there's very few inter-language linking, the only important things is the language precised in the URL
the language given by the browser/cookies being used only if we visit the website without this language in the url (so that one can give link to an international audience with wikipedia.org and being sure that all the user will arrive to the main page of their prefered language)
3 - user language > language in the URL for website like tatoeba where inter-language linking is very high, we don't want the user to get the interface in an other language only because he's collaborating with someone that has the interface in an other language. (especially as the "content" is the same)
The language of the URL is used only for the first visit , browser language when no language in the interface and first visit
and a special link when a user want to explicitly switch to an other language
in case 2-3 we need to handle the case in which the language is either a subfolder (like taoteba.org/en/something ) or a subdomain ( like en.wikipedia.org)
For website that need to deal with several interface languages, depending of the audience, we need to be able to choose between
1 - same URL / domain but languages determined by browser preference and after cookies, and the language can be "forced" using a dedicated URL (like example.com/language/change-to/fr even if my browser is english and my previous cookies/sessions are saying 'chinese'
2 - language in the URL , URL > cookies, for website like wikipedia where the inner content can really be different from one language to another and where there's very few inter-language linking, the only important things is the language precised in the URL the language given by the browser/cookies being used only if we visit the website without this language in the url (so that one can give link to an international audience with wikipedia.org and being sure that all the user will arrive to the main page of their prefered language)
3 - user language > language in the URL for website like tatoeba where inter-language linking is very high, we don't want the user to get the interface in an other language only because he's collaborating with someone that has the interface in an other language. (especially as the "content" is the same)
The language of the URL is used only for the first visit , browser language when no language in the interface and first visit
and a special link when a user want to explicitly switch to an other language
in case 2-3 we need to handle the case in which the language is either a subfolder (like taoteba.org/en/something ) or a subdomain ( like en.wikipedia.org)