Why not persist it through a query param? Or a lang param for that matter

Feels like maybe you're just noticing this because it defaults to Chinese. Is that true?

How many sites do this but you don't notice because they default to English?

You're right, there are probably lots of sites misconfigured to not respect language headers, but we don't notice because English is the default.

However, the right solution is still to use the language header. I send that to them, they should use it to give me the right one by default.

One of the funny things is that this whole site is in an iframe; which breaks both Google Translate, and the Firefox translate feature. If you check, the outer iframe seems to indicate `lang="en'` and loads the iframe with `src="/coder/index.html?lang=en"`, but the inner iframe still gets a `lang="zh-CN'` by default until you use the toggle.

If you go to the eventual redirect source of the page with `lang=en` parameter, you get a `lang="en"` attribute, but it's still in Chinese until you toggle it with the menu: https://mimo.xiaomi.com/coder?lang=en

Anyhow, yeah, lots of pages are probably broken this way but we don't notice. But still, it has that info from your request, it should use it.

But what if you have English configured as a preferred language? Isn't that what it's for? Wouldn't it make sense for a website to respect that (when available)? I hate that google.com doesn't and defaults to random languages based on IP.

Web standard often give great grounds to leverage on. Modern stacks often really poorly work with a lot its surface and reinvente half baked bespoke alternatives.

Personally, none, I’m not English native. I didn’t notice the locale switch, but mostly because the look of the website was so beautiful I didn’t pay attention to menus. I wonder if ideograms keeps looking so beautiful once you learned to decode them. I never found Latin script to be particularly beautiful, and to this date Arabic script remains my favorite one in term of esthetic (I can’t read Arabic ever).

This is not exactly what you’re asking about, but I started learning Japanese when I was in the middle of playing Cyberpunk 2077 (for unrelated reasons); and I gotta tell you; realizing that 98% of the Japanese text everywhere in the game was just “hotel” or “karaoke” definitely took away some charm from it.

This is really strange, but the link provided has an iframe pointing to https://mimo.xiaomi.com/coder

When you look at the source, you can set it to English from the params https://mimo.xiaomi.com/coder?lang=en but there's a small bug, the hero subtitle isn't translated but everything else is.

Wondering why this is in an iframe.... so strange

Language support was probably an afterthought since their target audience all read Chinese