title: Canonical url and localization
body: <p>In my application I have localized urls that look something like this:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><a href="http://examle.com/en/animals/elephant" rel="noreferrer">http://examle.com/en/animals/elephant</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://examle.com/nl/dieren/olifant" rel="noreferrer">http://examle.com/nl/dieren/olifant</a></li>
  <li><a href="http://examle.com/de/tiere/elefant" rel="noreferrer">http://examle.com/de/tiere/elefant</a></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>This question is mainly for Facebook Likes, but I guess I will hit similar problems when I start thinking about search engine crawlers.</p>
  
  <p>What kind of url would you expect as canonical url? I don't want to use the <strong>exact</strong> english url, because I want that people clicking the link will be forwarded to their own language (browser setting/dependent on IP). </p>
  
  <p>The IP lookup is not something that I want to do on every page hit. Besides that I would need to incorporate more 'state' in my application, because I have to check wether a user has already been forwarded to his own locale, or is browsing the english version on purpose.</p>
  
  <p>I guess it will going to be something like:</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://example.com/something/animals/elephant" rel="noreferrer">http://example.com/something/animals/elephant</a></p>
  
  <p>or maybe without any language identifier at all:</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://example.com/animals/elephant" rel="noreferrer">http://example.com/animals/elephant</a></p>
  
  <p>but that is a bit harder to implement, bigger chance on url clashes in the future (in the rare case I would get a category called <em>en</em> or <em>de</em>).</p>
  
  <p><strong>Summary</strong></p>
  
  <p>What kind of url would you expect as canonical url? Is there already a standard set for this?</p>