I'm doing a site which supports multiple languages. At the moment, I’m doing like /en/… in the URL path and using .htaccess to determine which language the user is on. Actually, this is very common for sites with multiple languages to either do http://en.example.com or http://example.com/en/.
My question is: Why is it so common to show in the URL which language the user is viewing? I can't see any technical advantages. Is it for optimizing user experience?
Because you could easily just use sessions/cookies and hide it from the user which I'm leaning to at the moment.
Thanks in advance :)
For easy bookmarking probably. Specifying the language information in the URL is 1 way to indicate that you want to view in that particular language, ignoring your current locale.
Wrapping this information in the URL is better than using a cookie for example, as some users may delete all cookies after each browsing session. And because of this pseudo REST like URL, /en/, it is easily bookmarkable, and search engine friendly