RE: Authoring Techniques Document

> > 4. No mention is made of the technique of using <link 
> rel="alternate"
> > hreflang="xx" ...
> > 
> > The link element is now widely implemented in browsers (Internet 
> > Explorer and Safari are the only two reasonably well-known browsers 
> > that don't implement it), and as a backup for language negotitation 
> > (analagous to including charset
> > metadata) it seems worthwhile. It would also enable easier 
> searching 
> > for language variants rather than simply offering auto-translated 
> > versions. Many large organisations make extensive use of 
> Dublin Core 
> > metadata, which would allow them to generate this 
> relatively simply...
> 
> 
> Thanks for bringing this up.  We will look into it.  
> 
> We know that the link element is recognised in some user 
> agents, but we are not clear whether user agents do anything 
> with the language related information specifically.  Do you 
> have more details of how this works? We plan to write some 
> tests for this.


I just implemented this for the following pages:
http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-when-lang-neg.fr
http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-when-lang-neg.en

I see that in Firebird at the bottom of my screen it now says "More".
Clicking on that pops up "Other versions >", and clicking on that pops up
"French: Version française" or "English: English version" (depending on
which file) and clicking on *that* takes you to the other page.

The "English:" or "French:" text is generated from the hreflang information.
The rest comes from the title attribute of the link element.

Thinking about how useful that is: I guess that if I spoke the language my
user agent speaks but not that of the page - eg. I landed on a page in an
incomprehensible language - I could look for a version in my language easily
enough.  Can't help thinking that it's better to plonk it right at the top
of the page, though, like we currently do.

If I was using someone else's browser with a UI in, say, Persian, I'd be
stuck unless I was familiar enough with the UA to guess my way through the
menu at the bottom.

I don't see any support in my latest versions of Mozilla or Netscape (other
than looking in the Page Info - which is not very helpful). Nor in Opera.
Hardly surprising, couldn't see any support in IE.

Andrew, for your test file you could try varying the presence of the
hreflang info & title info.

RI

Received on Wednesday, 28 April 2004 12:49:37 UTC