[XHTML 2] 13.1 Hypertext Attributes Module - hreflang

Dear HTML Working Group,

The hreflang attribute says:

"The user agent must use this list as the field value of the accept-language 
request header when requesting the resource using HTTP."

This is a bad idea, if a user agent cannot understand German, it is not 
appropriate for it to duplicate the entry, consider:

<a href="chickens" hreflang="en;q=0.5, de"> Chickens </a>

With a user agent which has the following accept-language configured by the 
user "en;q=1", the constraint on user agents to send the hreflang attribute 
will result in a german document for the user despite the fact the user 
agent knows that the user cannot understand it.

Please remove this restriction, I see no reason why an author should be able 
to change the accept headers including the quality values of resources. If 
the author knows the types are of different qualities then it can handle 
this on the server after knowing the users preferences.

If you do not remove the restriction please change to using an intersection 
as per the contentType attribute in Section 5.5, however we will also need 
information on how quality values are combined in this situation.

Please also add this conformance requirement on user agents to the section 
3.2 to allow for a clear conformance section covering everything a user 
agent needs to be.

Regards,

Jim Ley

Received on Saturday, 28 May 2005 12:19:37 UTC