Re: Link checker: 404 error for http://www.debian.org/support

On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 20:44:10 +0200, Ville Skyttä <ville.skytta@iki.fi>
posted to gmane.org.w3c.validator:
 > On Wed, 2004-02-18 at 14:38, era+gmane@iki.fi wrote:
 >> I can access the page <http://www.debian.org/support> just fine, but
 >> <http://validator.w3.org/checklink?uri=http%3A//www.debian.org/support>
 >> displays a 404 error for this page (and also others on the site
 >> www.debian.org, but by no means all of them).
 > http://www.debian.org/support seems to result in a 404 for all
 > requests which have "Accept-Language: *".

For what it's worth, I submitted a bug to the Debian webmasters about
this; it is available on the web at <http://bugs.debian.org/233831>.

However, it's not clear to me why sending Accept-Language: * is useful.
Isn't it completely redundant? If you can accept any language, why do
you need to advertise your lack of preference? (Hmm. You advertise
your capability to cope with variants, at least. But still, is that
useful in any way?)

 > By default, link checker sends the Accept-Language headers sent by the
 > user's browser to the target links as-is.  But if that header is not
 > present in the incoming request, link checker sends the "*" case above
 > instead.  Sending of the Accept-Language header can also be prevented
 > altogether, see the link checker "front page".

So could the default be changed so that it is not sent unless you ask
for it? Or at least a "revalidate" form above the results, where you
get to see these options, like you already have for the HTML validator?

 >> (When viewing these pages directly I get them in English. If I had
 >> to fall back to some other language I would prefer Swedish, but my
 >> reverse DNS obviously indicates that I am in Finland. Whoever is
 >> responsible for conjecturing language preference from [apparent]
 >> geographical location should be flogged.)
 > Yup.  But decent browsers allow one to configure the language
 > preferences too, which you could then set to "en, sv"... which should
 > then again be preferred over any DNS heuristics by a sane service.

Certainly, I have this set up according to my preference already. I
don't really want fallback even to Swedish and so I have not bothered
to set up any language preferences whatsoever in Mozilla ... Maybe I
should set it up with en-US although that seems a bit redundant. But
yup, that gets me the English version of the news page, too.

/* era */

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Received on Friday, 20 February 2004 00:32:29 UTC