Re: [heycam/webidl] Exceptions not localizable (#1024)

Most developer's initial intuition is that Exceptions are "meant to be consumed by developers". In that case the localization of the message makes it an even greater pain in the ass to figure out what went wrong (and it's not helpful to localize). 

The problem is that Exceptions, as used in distributed environments (such as the Web), often provide the only mechanism to convey information to the end user for certain kinds of user interaction failure. When that information is an opaque string, the recipient can have few alternatives than to display the message to the customer. This is especially true when the error conditions are implementation dependent and cannot be closely described/specified in advance and/or where the message is partially filled in with data values. It is important to remember that users of a system generally vastly outnumber developers.

So my plea in the previous comment would be to provide guidance to specification developers who are building exceptions (particularly those where the line is blurry as described above) on how to structure their exceptions to avoid problems (for both users and developers)--or to avoid using exceptions as a means of communicating these types of failure. Maybe that's a doc I18N should write that WebIDL can then footnote as appropriate.

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Received on Wednesday, 22 September 2021 17:54:39 UTC