Dev411 Blog

Playing around with browser locale settings and the resulting HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE values, I've started to realize that websites often don't fallback to the language if you are using a two part locale they don't support but they do support the language only. Let's say a browser has the following preferences set up:

1. en-us
2. de

A website that only has en and de will typically fail on en-us and then return German. My intuition tells me the server would be more user friendly if it parsed en-us to try the language portion, en, before moving on to the next locale but there would be situations where the user won't get exactly what s/he wants? What do you think? Should servers fallback from two part locales to a one part language or should it be up to the user to manage it correctly in their browser?