Checklink: missing error messages

Dear experts,

This is an error report for checklink.

I just used it on
http://validator.w3.org/checklink?url=http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Translati 
on/Overview.html


Some of the things I got are:

http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Translation/Japanese
What to do:
HTTP Code returned: 406
HTTP Message: Not Acceptable
Line: 62

http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Hosts/Keio/
What to do:
HTTP Code returned: 406
HTTP Message: Not Acceptable
Line: 62

One problem is that the 'What to do' doesn't give any advice.
This is important because the advice is colored according to
the severity of the problem. It would be red here, but the red
is not shown because there is no text that could be given a red
background.

The other problem is that it looks as if the checklink program
is sending some 'Accept-Language' headers in some not really
optimal way. For example, I can access
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Hosts/Keio/ because I have
Japanese as one of my languages, but I cannot access
http://validator.w3.org/checklink?url=http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Hosts/Keio/
When I try with telnet, I can get to the page if I don't have
an Accept-Language header. Using either the Accept-Language
header of the requester or none seems reasonable, but it
looks like checklink is sending out Accept-Language with
some arbitrary language (turns out this is english, see

http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/validator/httpd/cgi-bin/checklink.pl?rev 
=3.6&content-type=text/plain:

 >>>>
  if ($_accept_language) {
     $request->header('Accept-Language' => 'en');
   }
 >>>>

Having a default of english is not a good idea in my opinion.


Regards,    Martin.

Received on Thursday, 5 December 2002 15:46:17 UTC