[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Multilingual error messages

[Mark Ryan]

On 9/29/05, Rowan Collins <rowan.collins at 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-support.php?view=markup

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