Re: Image or text for 'Internationalization'?

You can override MSIE's 'helpful' behaviour by ensuring that the error page you
generate has more than a critical number of characters within its body. I think
the critical number is 256.

Just pad the error page with white space, within the <body> .. </body> section,
and it will display _your_ error page, rather than its own.

HTH

Chris Haynes

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Martin Duerst" <duerst@w3.org>
To: "Russ Rolfe" <rrolfe@windows.microsoft.com>; "Richard Ishida"
<ishida@w3.org>; <www-international@w3.org>
Cc: "Shawn Lawton Henry" <shawn@w3.org>; "Masayasu Ishikawa"
<mimasa@w3.mag.keio.ac.jp>
Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 2004 12:32 AM
Subject: 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 08:42:25 UTC