Re: Proposal for an HTTP ERR method

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004, Henry Story wrote:

> 2. The question of who/what should be notified of an error.
>
> Here I have a number of contradictory intuitions.
>     - If an object in the day to day world breaks, say a tire, I don't
> notify it that it is broken, but the manufacturer.

Yes, or a car technician, or your significant other. You will talk to
whoever you think is responsible for _fixing_ the tire (if broken tire
is the primary problem and your goal is to fix it). If collecting
money from the manufacturer is your goal, in some countries, you might
talk to a lawyer first. If informing other drivers of a bad tire brand
is your goal, you will contact some customers union.

>     - If I am talking to someone and they are stepping on my toe, I
> might say "err, you are stepping on my toe".

Yes, and you are not saying that to someone's leg or even someone's
torso. You will talk to whoever you think is ultimately responsible
for freeing your toe from the pressure (which, in some corner cases,
may not be the owner of the leg that is on your toe!).

>     - If I send a government agency a request for a form, and they
> send me something back in spanish ... I may send back another letter
> to the same address explaining the error in a language well
> understood by everybody to be an error message.

You might, but this is a fuzzy example that depends on whether agency
is using the same address for all correspondence, whether agency
departments are efficient at forwarding your letter internally,
whether Spanish department has English speakers, whether you want a
speedy response, etc.

Note that if you are more interested in solving the general problem
(which is wrong language used for communication to customers) than in
getting the right form, then you probably should complain to customer
service rather than the department that sent you the form (and, yes,
customer service address may be the same as the department address).


So, in all these examples, you are most likely to contact the entity
responsible for troubleshooting. That entity depends on the actual
problem you want to solve and it may or may not be the same entity
that caused the trouble.

Alex.

Received on Thursday, 24 June 2004 11:26:07 UTC