Feature Request: Language Specific Urls

[po-87]

It would be useful if the <url> tag supported the xml:lang property so that we can link to language specific pages if they exist.

Right now we can only link to one language (which would typically be English). If the user prefers another language the user would have to manually switch to the preferred language after clicking the link which is not very user-friendly. It would be much better if they were linked to the correct page directly.

[ximion]

Nearly all websites adjust the default language based on the browser locale. Why wouldn't that work for this usecase?

[po-87]

That is not my experience.

Usually each language has its own URL. Assuming that the user wants the locale language is often done for the root URL of the website (/) but doing it for subpages is not user friendly if you ask me.

Personally, I often prefer English (as it's often the "official language" and better written/more complete) but if a page is available in my native language I might want to check that out too (at the same time). I might also want to link to the language-specific pages. Having to change some site-wide setting (or worse, change my locale) is just not user friendly. For this reason I dislike when websites (and applications) force a language on me based on my locale.

Some examples of websites that have language-specific URLs:

• wikipedia.org (root links to different languages, not all pages are available in all languages)
• libreoffice.org (root is in English)
• splashmapper.xyz (root redirects to the locale language; defaults to English if not supported)
• musescore.org (root redirects to the locale language)
• krita.org (root redirects to locale language)
• liu.se (root is in Swedish)

I could make this list much longer...

Some of these will redirect subpages to the locale-specific page if the language-specific part of the URL is left out (e.g. musescore.org/download will redirect to musescore.org/fr/download when using a French locale) but many won't. For websites, like the LibreOffice one, that doesn't use a language URL specifier for the default language it wouldn't even be technically possible to do so.

Regardless of personal opinion, it's a fact of reality that some websites work like this and they need Appstream to support translatable URLs in order to link correctly for all languages.