Last modified: 2011-10-02 09:16:25 UTC
Currently, fallback languages are fix for each langauges. They undoubtedly represent a "best choice" but: 1) There are instances of groups of people of (usually small) languages who are fluent in a third language while next to illiterate in the fallback language. 2) When developing new translations, you want to quickly and easily compare your new, or yet to be made, translation to various other languages. These are usually the ones a translator happens to know, and thus completely inpredictable. 3) Individuals may happen to know an arbitrary set of languages well, which is unrelated to the fallback languages of their preferred localizations. Why not give them the best set of understandable texts possible? 4) Maybe more. Caveat: Use of this feature may degrade cacheability of pages. When that is an issue, pages using nonstandard fallback chains need to be marked in a way that allows caches to distinguish them from standard ones, in cases when they are indeed different. The relative number of such occurrences can safely be estimated to be quite low, however.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 11267 ***
