Re: hreflang

Laurens Holst wrote:
> Jukka K. Korpela schreef:
>> But it's actually worse than useless when it is incorrect. And the 
>> destination of a link _may_ change language - perhaps switching to a 
>> language-negotiated version - without notifying people who link to it.)
> 
> Well, I suppose that’s what the new definition of hreflang is trying to 
> avoid. Although I’m not sure that’s a good idea; I’d say the visitor 
> would obviously prefer the link to be in a language he understands.

Indeed, that is the intention of the new definition.

When you want users to have the version in the languages they choose, 
you don't use hreflang:

 <a href="report">The latest version</a>

but if you want to supply an explicit link to a language version, you 
can include the attribute:

 <a href="report" hreflang="nl">The report in Dutch</a>

I would call this the best of both worlds. It means, for instance, that 
someone whose preferred language is not Dutch, but who can nevertheless 
speak Dutch, can get to the Dutch version (for instance to check the 
translation).

Steven Pemberton
Accept-Language: en-gb,en-uk;q=0.9,en;q=0.8,nl;q=0.7,fr;q=0.6,*;q=0.1

Received on Monday, 6 February 2006 10:02:09 UTC