Since links may point to documents encoded with different character encodings, the A and LINK elements support the charset attribute. This attribute allows authors to advise user agents about the encoding of data at the other end of the link.

The hreflang attribute provides user agents with information about the language of a resource at the end of a link, just as the lang attribute provides information about the language of an element's content or attribute values.

Armed with this additional knowledge, user agents should be able to avoid presenting "garbage" to the user. Instead, they may either locate resources necessary for the correct presentation of the document or, if they cannot locate the resources, they should at least warn the user that the document will be unreadable and explain the cause.