What Does “loc:” Do In a WebPartZone's Title?

Question

I know everyone does this, but I can't find an actual answer to what this does on MSDN...

When you have a WebPartZone defined in a page, you set the Title property like:

<WebPartPages:WebPartZone runat="server" ID="Center" Title="loc:Center">
  ...
</WebPartPages:WebPartZone>

You can find plenty of examples like this on this site:

Rendering Webpartzone is to large

positioning a data view web part in a body webpartzone

default custome webpart became static on custom site page

I assume "loc:" means localization (or perhaps it means location?). But what does this do?

Answer 1

In SharePoint 2010 WebPartZone Title property is obsolete and DisplayTitle should be used instead.

Title property is declared as

[Obsolete("Use DisplayTitle instead.")]
    public string Title
    {
      get
      {
        return this.DisplayTitle;
      }
      set
      {
        this.HeaderText = value;
      }
    }

According to MSDN DisplayTitle property:

A string that contains the title text for a zone. The default is the value of the base HeaderText property.

DisplayTitle

DisplayTitle property value could be specified as a regular string or localization string. For case of localization string the following format is used: "loc:{ResourceKey}",for example "loc:Center"

In that case it value is retrieved by key from resource file Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.strings.resources embedded into assembly Microsoft.SharePoint.intl.dll