Re: AW: AW: XHTML 2.0 and hreflang

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Am Mittwoch, 12. November 2003 21:27 schrieb Oskar Welzl:
> Hi Christian,
>
> > hreflang describes the language of a resource. The resource might
> > exist in
> > multiple variants with different languages.
> > That's what makes it different from xml:lang.
> > While in <span xml:lang="de">Guten Tag</span> you can exactly say
> > that it's
> > german, for the resource http://www.hujer.com/start you can't,
> > because that
> > document is english or german depending on your user agent's
> > Accept-Language
> > header in its http request.
>
> Agreed
>
> > I do not want to include the language name in the canonical URI
> > because I want
> > to keep it stable and the file name scheme might change. Also, I want the
> > canonical URI to be international.
>
> Agreed
>
> > But if the user chooses to override the user agent's settings by
> > willingly
> > choosing the German language variant, I'd like the German
> > variants to include
> > hreflang="de, en;q=0.8" in their links, telling the server that
> > the German
> > resource is preferred, and only if it doesn't exist, the English
> > one should
> > be chosen.
>
> I don't understand this paragraph. If the *user* chooses to overrider the
> settings of his UA - well, he can do so, can't he? He can always change the
> settings of his UA. However, the user will not be able to change the
> hreflang-attribute of the document that links to the remote resource, will
> he?

Okay, example.
Some documents exist in German only, some in English only, some in both 
variants.
Imagine the user agent is configured to only accept en.
start exists as start.de and start.en
The user will get start.en (user agent's choice).
Now he follows a link to a German page:
<a href="start.de" hreflang="de" title="This page in German">This page in 
German</a>
Now he should get start.de (user's choice, overriding any content negotiation 
because the language information is part of the resource name).

- From the German page, he follows a link to another page with the following 
hotspot:
<a href="glossary" hreflang="de, en;q=0.8" title="Das Glossar">Glossar</a>
Now he should get glossary.de if it exists, glossary.en otherwise (user's 
choice, overriding the user agent's configuration).

Perhaps the term "user's choice" is a bit wrong here, but I can't think of a 
better one. The choice if the user is based on the hyperreferences he/she 
follows, not on the settings. I would normally not request the user to change 
his/her user agent's accept language settings, since most average web users 
would be swamped with tampering with their user agent's settings.


Bye
- -- 
ITCQIS GmbH
Christian Wolfgang Hujer
Geschäftsführender Gesellschafter (Shareholding CEO)
Telefon: +49  (0)89  27 37 04 37
Telefax: +49  (0)89  27 37 04 39
E-Mail: Christian.Hujer@itcqis.com
WWW: http://www.itcqis.com/
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Received on Thursday, 13 November 2003 04:46:22 UTC