Re: hreflang

Oskar Welzl wrote:
> 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 it has no normative effect on a web page whatsoever.

	<a href="doc" hreflang="nl">...

has no difference to

	<a href="doc" <!-- doc is in Dutch --> >...

> 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.

This is a good use of hreflang, and is not an argument against something 
sensible being done with the value, like actually going and fetching 
that version of the document.

> 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.

Still, as I said before, if the metainformation is correct, nothing 
breaks, you get the exact same result. If the metainformation is wrong, 
you get a better result. Sounds like a win-win to me...

Steven Pemberton

Received on Monday, 6 February 2006 12:47:05 UTC