Evan Martin wrote:
On 11/14/05, Evan Prodromou evan@wikitravel.org wrote:
I think it'd be useful for most multilingual MediaWiki installations that use interlanguage links to have such hidden <link> elements. <link> elements aren't rendered in most browsers (Mozilla 1.5+, I think, will show links in a menu on the toolbar), but as mentioned they do provide some guidance to bots and spiders.
The downside is that they still take up network bandwidth, and for oft-interwikied pages on big sites (e.g. Wikipedia) this section could run to the 5-10kB size range. (My off-the-cuff estimate for, say, articles where each <link> is about 100B, and there are 50-100 interwiki links.)
What problem is this change trying to fix? I'm not sure I see the pros outweighing the cons...
A possible point in favour: using rel="alternate" together with the hreflang attribute in <link> elements (as per http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/links.html#h-12.3, section 12.3.3) might help search engines make smarter decisions about indexing Wikipedia content, thus increasing the relevance and availability of Wikipedia content in Web searches made by the general public.
-- Neil