Re: Wikitech-l Digest, Vol 28, Issue 29 - Wikitech-l

15 Nov 2005

      wikitech-l-request@wikimedia.org schrieb:
...
Send Wikitech-l mailing list submissions to
   wikitech-l@wikimedia.org
To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
   http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
   wikitech-l-request@wikimedia.org
You can reach the person managing the list at
   wikitech-l-owner@wikimedia.org
When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of Wikitech-l digest..."
Today's Topics:

<link> elements for interlanguage link information
(Evan Prodromou)

Re: <link> elements for interlanguage link information
(?var Arnfj?r? Bjarmason)
Re: Wiki-to-XML (Magnus Manske)
Re: Re: Wiki-to-XML (Magnus Manske)
Re: <link> elements for interlanguage link information
(Evan Martin)
Re: cluster monitoring (Ashar Voultoiz)
Re: cluster monitoring (Ashar Voultoiz)
Re: <link> elements for interlanguage link information
(Ashar Voultoiz)
Re: <link> elements for interlanguage link information
(Neil Harris)
Re: cluster monitoring (Tim Starling)

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2005 10:10:04 -0500
From: Evan Prodromou evan@wikitravel.org
Subject: [Wikitech-l] <link> elements for interlanguage link
   information
To: wikitech-l@wikimedia.org
Message-ID: 1131981004.29814.52.camel@zhora.1481ruerachel.net
Content-Type: text/plain
I was pointed to this section of the HTML 4.0 spec ("Notes on helping
search engines index your Web site") at W3C recently:
   http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/appendix/notes.html#h-B.4

I was specifically interested in this section, which I quote in full:
   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">

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.)
Barring objections I'm going to add a feature to HEAD to render these
<link> elements, controlled by a variable $wgInterLanguageLinkElement ,
default to false.
~Evan