Ok, that's reasonable. Re: content-negotation: the www FAQ[1] makes me think that, at least currently, it's not worth attempting anything more advanced than language negotiation.
Re: file suffixes: after re-reading the Sphinx code and experimenting with a few builds: I'm convinced that the html_file_suffix setting does _not_ help. I couldn't think of a better near-term alternative than using the cron script to adjust the searchindex.js src attribute, similar to the HTML hrefs. I don't really like that, though. And finally, re: other Sphinx-built documentation, I noticed some JavaScript errors for the language chooser in the online HTML developers-reference[2], so I've opened a merge request[3] related to that. It's not directly related here, but I'm mentioning it because the documentation projects share some similarities. [1] - https://www.debian.org/devel/website/desc.en.html#faq [2] - https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/ [3] - https://salsa.debian.org/debian/developers-reference/-/merge_requests/48