Localizing Apache and Mozilla

Author: Arun Sharma
Date: Dec 15, 2001

This document attempts to help those of you who want to setup a language preference in your browser, so that when you visit a server, which offers the content in multiple languages, you get the content in your preferred language.

Settiing up the Apache web server

First add the following lines to your httpd.conf

$ egrep Language.*\(hi\|kn\) /etc/httpd/conf/commonhttpd.conf 
    AddLanguage kn-in .kn_IN
    AddLanguage hi-in .hi_IN

Now, create content as follows:

$ ls -l /var/www/html/bsd-india/bsd-india*
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         2247 Dec 16 15:45 /var/www/html/bsd-india/bsd-india.en.html
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         3510 Dec 16 15:45 /var/www/html/bsd-india/bsd-india.hi_IN.utf8.html
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           17 Dec 15 16:30 /var/www/html/bsd-india/bsd-india.html -> bsd-india.en.html
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         3776 Dec 15 16:13 /var/www/html/bsd-india/bsd-india.kn_IN.utf8.html

Restart the webserver and test that everything is working, as follows:

$ wget --header="Accept-language: hi" http://www.sharma-home.net/bsd-india/bsd-india
$ wget --header="Accept-language: kn" http://www.sharma-home.net/bsd-india/bsd-india

and you should get the content in the right language. Further, you should add the correct META tag to your HTML documents, so that a robot can classify it as a document written in a specific language. Example:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
	<title>BSD India</title>
	<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf8">
	<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="hi-IN">
</head>

The language tag should be from ISO 639 and the subtag is typically the country ( IANA assigned). Last but not the least, use the URI without the suffix, so that content negotiation is possible. In other words, use

http://www.sharma-home.net/bsd-india/bsd-india

and not

http://www.sharma-home.net/bsd-india/bsd-india.html

Setting up Mozilla

At the basic level, you want to make sure that the browser sends out the right "Accept-language" and "Accept-Charset" headers. In Mozilla, you can do this by navigating to:

Edit -> Preferences -> Navigator -> Languages

and adding your preferred languages. Examples are "hi-in" (Hindi) and "kn-in" (Kannada).

The recommended encoding for Indian languages is UTF-8.

Setting up IE

In Microsoft Internet explorer, you can do this by navigating to:

Tools -> Internet Options -> Languages