Quoth Paul Makepeace on Wed, Oct 06, 1999:
> Working in an international company where a significant number do not speak
> particularly good English it seems ironic to me that so much effort goes into
> wording these error messages where the subtlety/nuance becomes increasingly
> restricted to an intellectual pursuit by the composers.
Then, the English text must come first, followed by a
machine-readable text.
> It also surprises me that in this day and age of increasing web ubiquity that
> software designers don't provide URLs to lengthy error descriptions that
> could include 'tricks' like language selection (based on charset, perhaps)
> and similar personalisation. For example, anchor that to the server who sent
> it and tag it with a message-id you could have a personalised explanation
> with full diagnostic info based on local config, etc.
>
> "Your message didn't get delivered as well as you might've hoped. Here's why
> http://mta.mycom.tld/oops.cgi?lang=en&code=552&msgid="
Oh my. Please don't. When I get a bounce, I want to see the "No
such user" message *in* *the* *bounce*, without having to launch
a web browser. And what about people who POP their mail from
their ISP to their home machine and read it offline? Will they
really want to dial up again just to read an *error message*?
Bad idea.
> I meet people who don't see a single use for HTML or non-ASCII in email
> either. Baffling isn't it?
We have Da Web (or Da Internet, whatever) and FTP. Why do we
need HTML mail? If you want to write something, just write it.
If you want your message to contain pictures and fonts of
different sizes, put it on Da Web.
Vadik.
--
Bell Labs Unix -- Reach out and grep someone.
