More control on the URL

Please first try and understand the new language negotiation system in Drupal 7. This feature request and your reply to plach in [#2775092-174] seems to demonstrate that you failed to understand it.

1. If nothing in the URL contains a pointer to the language, how do you determine the language to be used?
2. As mentioned elsewhere, the new language negotiation basically allows any kind of weird setup, including setups like what you suggest (without any pointer in the entire URL), but such setups will obviously not work.

For me, this issue won't fix, but perhaps I'm missing something.

Are you saying that I am mistaken and that, in the case of the above example, we can use the API of language negotiation to override the behavior of the switcher block so that it does not send the information in the URL?

The language negotiation API is made of three parts:

• 'language': How to determine the language value of a given context.
• 'switcher': How to generate a language switch link for a given language provider.
• 'url_rewrite': How to rewrite outbound URLs to pass the language information, if necessary.

The 'URL' language negotiation provider, which uses the URLs (prefix or domain) to pass on the language information implements all of them. But the 'Session' language negotiation provider, which stores the language of a user in the session, only implements 'language' and 'switcher', and does not add anything to the URL.

Seems that you are all set here.

Please re-read and understand #5. 'url_rewrite' is optional, and it is not used for example by the 'Session' language negotiation provider.

I'm not quite sure of your use case, Dominic, but I kind of found the idea interesting nonetheless. So I went ahead and tried it out on a D7 test site. And, as Damien said, it works fine. If you go the language settings screen there is a tab where you can choose how you want Drupal to find out about the language. And you can only enable 'Session' if you want. Then, of course, it's your job to get that information into the session, but that shouldn't be too hard. You just need a Language switcher block which writes the appropriate value in the session depending on which link you click.

Just a side note: the Session language provider implements the language switcher callback and uses an URL parameter to change the language stored in the session. If the user is logged in, after the language switch the language parameter does not appear in the URL anymore (unless language is changed again), instead if the user is anonymous the language parameter is always used to ensure different page contents have different URLs.

You just need to write a custom module to do that. Covering all of core to be completely '?' free in URLs is quite a task. (Do you also dislike '#'? If so, have you ever turned on overlay module? :) ) A forum topic or something is probably more appropriate than a core support request. Or, if you have a CVS account, open up a new project (if you are going to turn it into a proper module !!!). Because the general lack of interest in this functionality, which I derived from all the various responses to your comments, I would say that something like this has to actually exist and work in contrib before it is even considered to be put in core. Properly working this out in contrib would also reveal where certain APIs are inflexible, etc. and what potentially needs to be done in core to support this in contrib.

@Dominic Mayers:

Yes, you described the current behavior correctly.

subscribing - kinda curious

Myself I am dealing with language setup by setting my default language to whatever I want for the site to be.

Then using tokens, without the language token, in the url aliases to make both my default language have the exact same tokens as my language neutral.

Then, I add the language token to the site urls for the non-default languages.

Seems to be working for me the default language and the language neutral both do not have a language prefix in the url and this looks cleaner to me, though, I am still working on figuring the i18n and l10n and languages out.

I'll post back when I have clearer results if anyone would like.