Multilingual Website
A site offering content in two or more languages without dividing it by country, so all Spanish speakers share one version regardless of where they live.
Analogy Mental model
A product manual printed in three languages, identical wherever in the world it was sold.
In practice What you actually do
The right model for software, digital tools, and anything without physical logistics or per-country pricing. Annotate with language subtags only, such as English, Spanish, German, with no country component, because the content does not vary by jurisdiction.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
Language and country codes are different vocabularies and get confused constantly. The code for English is not the same as the country code for the United Kingdom, and the code for Japanese is not the country code for Japan. Using a country code where a language belongs produces invalid markup that is silently ignored.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →