RE: Image or text for 'Internationalization'?

At 02:34 04/11/16, Russ Rolfe wrote:

 >At 11/14/2004 5:18 PM Martin Duerst wrote
 >
 >>Aside:
 >>The two links:
 >>http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset.ja
 >>http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset.en
 >
 >>work without problem, but the link
 >>http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset.sv
 >>gives a 406, not acceptable. The first reason for this is probably that
 >my Accept-
 >>Language header says that I'm okay with Japanese and English, but not
 >with Swedish.
 >>But clicking on a link that explicitly says "Swedish" and not being
 >able to get to the >Swedish page directly is a problem.
 >>My guess is that one way to fix this is to point to the full file name
 >"O-
 >>charset.sv.html". Another may be to change some server settings.
 >
 >I had the same problem with IE 6.  I could not go to either the .ja or
 >.sv links until I added them in my language preference settings.  I to
 >fee that one should be able to go to these links even though one may not
 >have the language set as a preference.  It may be confusing to the
 >reader trying to just view these links for reference.

The problem (originating with our server settings) is worse with
IE than with other browsers, because IE, instead of displaying
the page that is sent back with the error response, choses to put
up it's own error message just giving the error code.

Users of other browsers have to make an additional click on a link to
http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset.sv.html, but users
of IE have no way to find out that
http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset.sv.html brings
them to the Swedish version.

The only justification for this IE behavior that I have heard so
far is internationalization: If somebody in Japan gets a page
in English or whatever, they'll have no clue what's wrong. If they
get the IE standard error 'page' (produced by the browser, in
Japanese), they'll know that the page was not found.

I think this has a point, but the case in question, it's clear
that this isn't a good solution. At the minimum, the standard
browser-generated page should have a link to 'more information
from server' that allows the server's response page to be displayed.
Another way to deal with this would be to display the server response
page, and put up the (Japanese or whatever) explanation for the
status code into the status bar. A simple and clear sentence
explaining the specifics of the error code (rather than the
current page with many short snippets of text, none of them
really giving an idea what the problem is) could easily be done.


Regards,    Martin.

Received on Tuesday, 16 November 2004 02:39:52 UTC