0.10.10 — a bar instead of a redirect

Once two language versions are standing, an idea appears that looks obvious: read the header listing the browser’s languages and send the reader to the right one. Ten lines at the edge, one address to quote everywhere, problem gone. We do not do it, and it is worth writing down why.

The browser’s language is not the reader’s preference. Someone living abroad has a phone in the language of the country where they bought it, not the one they want to read prose in. The relation runs the other way too, and there is no way to tell from the header which case you are looking at.

The second reason is practical: search engines advise against automatic redirects by language and recommend instead declaring the parallel versions in the document head. A crawler arrives with one language setting, so a redirect would always send it to the same place — and the version carrying the site’s whole history could lose out.

The third is the most important. A redirect takes the choice away; a bar offers it. It renders only on the reader’s side, and only when the instance is multilingual, the browser’s language matches another version, and no decision has been made yet in that browser. The server returns nothing, so the bar does not interfere with what a crawler sees as the content of the page. The answer is remembered and nobody sees the bar twice.

The side effect turned out to be more interesting than the feature. Since a reader who lands on the “wrong” version is home after one click, ONE address can be quoted everywhere — in the footer of preview cards, on watermarks, in profile descriptions. A solution that began by rejecting a redirect removed the very problem the redirect was meant to cure.

The document head gained a declaration of the parallel versions along with a default one. That is the proper answer for search engines — it says the versions are equals, not that one duplicates the other.