Re: BCP 47 reference (was Re: Last Call: draft-nottingham-http-link-header from digest)

On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 08:29:22AM -0700, Phillips, Addison wrote:
> > Regarding hreflang - looking through the history, it's been discussed
> > in a fairly positive light a few times, but never made it in. I think
> > it does make some sense, since it's both in Atom and HTML.
>
> I think hreflang would be useful to add. You might want to consider calling it
> just 'lang', since that locution is more familiar.

The closest (as a function of similarity and use) thing we have to this at the
moment is the <link> element in HTML. The @lang attribute of this element refers
to the language of the attributes and content, whereas the @hreflang attribute
is used to talk about the language of the target URI

Your proposal to use 'lang' to mean the same as @hreflang in HTML, when there is
also a seperate @lang HTML, is confusing. I think it is probably best if this
specification honours this historical distinction.

> I think you might want to make it more than a single language tag. The purpose
> of http-link-header is to provide metadata about a link in addition to the
> URI. This is more like providing the author's intended target audience rather
> than the document processing language. That is, it's like the Content-Language
> header and/or <meta> element, rather than like the <html> lang attribute. Cf.
> http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-http-and-lang#answer

Again, the closest thing we have to this is the <link> element in HTML:

  hreflang = langcode [CI]
    This attribute specifies the base language of the resource designated by
    href and may only be used when href is specified.

                  - http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#adef-hreflang

I would imagine we'd want to stick to roughly the same semantics.

Best,

-- 
Noah Slater, http://tumbolia.org/nslater

Received on Friday, 24 July 2009 15:58:04 UTC