QUESTION: <resource>, how would it work?

I've been reading over the RESOURCE working draft, and although I 
understand the general thrust of the proposals in it, I seem to be missing 
one key point here.

This excerpt from the draft summarizes my confusion:

    The future growth path here is to define a language in which the
    characteristics of a given relationship may be represented.
    Dereferencing of the relationship value as a URL would allow these
    characteristics to be read by a browser encountering a new
    relationship value. This could in turn enable reasoning and/or
    appropriate presentation to the user. 

What I'm not grasping is, in the case of examples cited in the draft where 
<link rel> denotes alternate versions of a generic document, say in 
various different languages, what exactly is presented to the user?

The <link> in the example is not to another .html document, evidently, but 
to a document of unspecifieed content-type (a text file?)... I'm simply 
not comprehending what happens next here.  How does the user agent present 
the user with an appropriately marked up HTML page at this point?

Thanks for your patience.

-----------
Brent Eades
Box 1759, Almonte, Ontario  K0A 1A0
http://www.worldlink.ca/almonte/brent

Received on Friday, 31 May 1996 08:52:36 UTC