Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Name

LanguagePriority

Synopsis

                  LanguagePriority MIME-lang MIME-lang...
Server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess

The LanguagePriority directive sets the precedence of language variants for the case in which the client does not express a preference when handling a multiviews request. The MIME-lang list is in order of decreasing preference. For example:

LanguagePriority en fr de

For a request for foo.html, where foo.html.fr and foo.html.de both exist but the browser did not express a language preference, foo.html.fr would be returned.

Note that this directive only has an effect if a “best” language cannot be determined by any other means. It will not work if there is a DefaultLanguage defined. Correctly implemented HTTP 1.1 requests will mean that this directive has no effect.

How does this all work? You can look ahead to the environment variables in Chapter 16. Among them were the following:

...
HTTP_ACCEPT=image/gif,image/x-bitmap,image/jpeg,image/pjpeg,*/*
...
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE=it
...

Apache uses this information to work out what it can acceptably send back from the choices at its disposal.