Re: Comment on working draft "Specifying Language in XHTML and HTML Content"

Richard Ishida scripsit:

> > I'm really leery about this one. It is extremely fragile. If 
> > you really wanted to mark the language of an HTML document 
> > pointed to, this is something that the browser would have a 
> > much better job of doing, since it could fetch the start of 
> > the page (working in the background) and pick up the actual 
> > language used on the page. So if you are evangelizing anyone, 
> > I'd think it'd be browser vendors. 
> 
> I agree that it's something you should be very careful about, but people
> are doing it and recommending it.  Note that the best practise doesn't
> recommend that you do this - it says that you should carefully consider
> the pros and cons - and I think we point out quite a few cons.  I take
> the approach that we can't simply dismiss this out of hand, but we can
> make people think carefully about whether it's the right thing to do.

As I understand it, the operational purpose of hreflang (I have no idea
which browsers do this, if any) is to set the Accept-Language: header in
any HTTP transaction used to fetch the document.  That way you can link
to a specific-language version of a document.  The XInclude analogue is
the accept-language attribute.


-- 
Do what you will,                       John Cowan
   this Life's a Fiction                cowan@ccil.org
And is made up of                       http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
   Contradiction.  --William Blake

Received on Wednesday, 14 March 2007 19:00:58 UTC