Re: hreflang

Am Sonntag, den 05.02.2006, 10:42 +0200 schrieb Jukka K. Korpela:

> (And the hreflang attribute probably always remains useless. Personally, I 
> use it sometimes - as a documentation for myself mostly. 

Why do you think it is useless? Because few people use it right now?
Well, maybe that's only because broswers dont display it today. When I
started to use a stylesheet that indicates languages of link targets
based on the value of @hreflang, I noticed people *not* following links
to sites they wouldnt understand. (OK, its a private website, it's only
a few readers and I can only watch them when i make them reed my latest
blog entries at the office; still, I watch carefully and see how they
quickly get to use the meta-information to their benefit.)
So from my experience, it is useful to people.

> But it's actually 
> worse than useless when it is incorrect. 

Thats true for anything between <html> and </html>.

> And the destination of a link 
> _may_ change language - perhaps switching to a language-negotiated 
> version - without notifying people who link to it.)

The language may change, the link may break at all because the target
document gets removed... all kinds of things can happen.
Still, as I said before: With @hreflang being meta-information only, its
not as bad. Nothing really breaks. Things get worse with a @hreflang
that is in fact an @acceptlang.

Regards, 
Oskar

Received on Monday, 6 February 2006 11:52:13 UTC