This page is no longer maintained and may be inaccurate. For more up-to-date information, see the Internationalization Activity home page.
A poster by Faith Zack shows an early implementation of language negotiation.
The Hyper-G hypertext system (which predates HTTP 1.0) was one of the first to implement language negotiation. Their Harmony browser offers users a dialogue box for configuring their preferred languages.
There was a proposal to use parameters to URIs to indicate the language version
in order to be able to obtain a specific language version independent of
the settings of a browser. For example, "aDocument.html" would
be the generic one, "aDocument.html;content-language=fr" would
be the French version. However, servers typically also provide separate URLs
for each of the variants, in addition to the generic URI, so it is usually
possible to link to them (once you know their name...). For the example above,
the explicit URI could be "aDocument.html" or
"aDocument.html.fr".