Alternate Language Link Inconsistency

In notes.html of the 4.0 draft, you give some examples
of LINK elements to alternate languges, where the title
attributes are in foreign languages:

-----excerpt-----
Specify language variants of this document

If you have prepared translations of this document into other
languages, you should use the LINK element to reference these.
This allows an indexing engine to offer users search results
in the user's preferred language, regardless of how the query
was written. For instance, the following links offer French
and German alternatives to a search engine: 

<LINK rel="alternate" href="mydoc-fr.html"
         lang="fr" title="La vie souterrainne">
<LINK rel="alternate" href="mydoc-de.html"
         lang="de" title="Das Leben im Untergrund">
-----end_excerpt-----



However, in the links.html file, these links are specified
using the title in English:

-----excerpt-----
The examples below illustrate how language information,
media types, and link types may be combined to improve
document handling by search engines. 

In the following example, we tell search engines where to
find Dutch, Portuguese, and Arabic versions of a document. 

<HEAD>
<LINK lang="nl" title="The manual in Dutch"
      rel="alternate"
      href="http://someplace.com/manual/dutch.html">
<LINK lang="pt" title="The manual in Portuguese"
      rel="alternate"
      href="http://someplace.com/manual/portuguese.html">
<LINK lang="ar" title="The manual in Arabic"
      dir="rtl"
      rel="alternate"
      href="http://someplace.com/manual/arabic.html">
</HEAD>
-----end_excerpt-----

Should the title element be specified in the language
of the title element's parent document, or in the
language of the resource being linked to?  Or is
it irrelevant?
-- 
E. Stephen Mack <estephen@emf.net>    http://www.emf.net/~estephen/

Received on Tuesday, 15 July 1997 07:03:36 UTC