In writing:
> In this examples the lang attribute says something about the
> document the url pointers to.
you are confusing the two attributes lang and hreflang.
Misha
> Hello Alex,
>
> I am afraid you are wrong.
>
> The "lang" attribute can say anything about the document the url
> points to.
> The "HTML 4.0 Specification
> W3C Recommendation 18-Dec-1997" says:
>
> "Attribute definitions
> lang = language-code [p.47] [CI] [p.43]
> This attribute specifies the base language of an element’s attribute
> values and text content. The
> default value of this attribute is unknown.
> Language information specified via the lang attribute may be
> used by a user agent to control rendering in
> a variety of ways. Some situations where author-supplied
> language information may be helpful include:
> Assisting search engines
> Assisting speech synthesizers
> Helping a user agent select glyph variants for high quality
> typography
> Helping a user agent choose a set of quotation marks
> Helping a user agent make decisions about hyphenation [p.88] ,
> ligatures, and spacing
> Assisting spell checkers and grammar checkers
> The lang attribute specifies the language of element content
> and attribute values; whether it is relevant
> for a given attribute depends on the syntax and semantics of the
> attribute and the operation involved."
>
> The recommendation gives examples:
>
> "Specify language variants of this document
> If you have prepared translations of this document into other
> languages, you should use the LINK
> element to reference these. This allows an indexing engine to
> offer users search results in the user’s
> preferred language, regardless of how the query was written. For
> instance, the following links offer
> French and German alternatives to a search engine:
> <LINK rel="alternate"
> type="text/html"
> href="mydoc-fr.html" hreflang="fr"
> lang="fr" title="La vie souterraine">
> <LINK rel="alternate"
> type="text/html"
> href="mydoc-de.html" hreflang="de"
> lang="de" title="Das Leben im Untergrund">"
>
> In this examples the lang attribute says something about the
> document the url pointers to.
>
> Kind regards,
> Jaap van Wingerde.
>
> > <META NAME="DC.Description" LANG="en" CONTENT="A story about a little girl going to
> > visit her grandmother. The little girl encounters a big bad wolf, and ends up
> > chopping off his head.">
> >
> > Then the META tag makes sense. It's saying "the description tag is written in
> > English, and it's the following..."
> >
> > The following just does not make sense to me:
> >
> > <META NAME="DC.Rights" LANG="en" SCHEME="URL"
> > CONTENT="http://www.here.com/copyright.html">
> >
> > This says to me "The Rights statement is a URL that is written in English." Which
> > prompts the question... is the URL really going to change depending on what language
> > you speak (or write)? If you tried to translate the "words" in the URL, you'd end up
> > with an HTTP Error 404 - Object Not Found.
> >
> > If the copyright statement is available in a number of languages, then I would
> > presume they would have different names. For example, an english speaking company
> > might have different language versions of their copyright document prepended with the
> > country or language code - an alternative would be to have the file named
> > "copyright".html, replacing the English word copyright with the local language
> > equivalent:
> >
> > <META NAME="DC.Rights" SCHEME="URL" CONTENT="http://www.here.com/copyright.html">
> > <META NAME="DC.Rights" SCHEME="URL" CONTENT="http://www.here.com/copyright-fr.html">
> > <META NAME="DC.Rights" SCHEME="URL" CONTENT="http://www.here.com/copyright-de.html">
> >
> > In theory, each of those documents would have metadata specifying the DC.Language
> > value (at least). The LANG attribute in this instance is totally irrelevant, since
> > the URL is not stored in any specific language.
> >
> > A smart search/retrieval engine would check out the three references and, recognising
> > that you speak French, return the French version of the copyright statement (which it
> > found by checking the DC.Language field of the metadata of the copyright statement).
> >
> > Where I *would* use the LANG attribute is in this instance:
> >
> > <META NAME="DC.Rights" LANG="en" CONTENT="This document copyright 1998 SomeCo Pty.
> > Ltd.">
> > <META NAME="DC.Rights" LANG="fr" CONTENT=(French version of the above)>
> > <META NAME="DC.Rights" LANG="de" CONTENT=(German version of the above)>
>
>
>
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> Homo bureaucrasis: survival of the fittest?
> *******************************************************
>
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