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...