Re: AW: AW: XHTML 2.0 and hreflang

> From: Christian Wolfgang Hujer <Christian.Hujer@itcqis.com>
>
> Am Mittwoch, 12. November 2003 21:27 schrieb Oskar Welzl:
> > I don't understand this paragraph. If the *user* chooses to over rider
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.

While a very smart UA might do that, I think more useful that trying
to put q-values into hreflang that should really be handled server-side
in the first place would be if it encountered the following:

<a href="glossary" hreflang="de, en, en-US, en-GB">Glossar</a>

that the user agent would make a default choice based on its settings
and offer in for example a right-click menu a choice of any of the four
language versions that the document asserts are available.

Received on Thursday, 13 November 2003 10:49:41 UTC