On 9/29/05, Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
Well, as I just discovered looking for something else, you can always "use the source, look": http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/tools/downtime/language-supp...
Nope, that's not it at all. I had no idea that existed! Except that one's for site maintenance rather than for unexpected errors.
When Squid encounters an error (which makes up a substantial proportion of downtime errors) it is configured to spit out a bland HTML page. It can't serve images or PHP scripts or anything of that nature: all we can have is a plain old HTML file :) The problem there is that we cannot use a server-side script to detect a user's language preferences. The only way to detect languages on the client-side is through Javascript, and that only reports the language used by the user's browser. Internet Explorer users have a better deal here, because IE can also return the language setting set by the user in the Control Panel (which is more likely to reflect the language the user is most comfortable with using).
For a preview, use the following URL: http://www.mindspillage.net/braindump/friends/error-utf8.htm
I don't expect it to remain up on Mindspillage's webspace for long. She has been very generous in allowing me the use of that webspace for testing and really does deserve a cookie.
~Mark Ryan