On Thu, 1 Mar 2001, Josip Rodin wrote: > On Thu, Mar 01, 2001 at 02:47:42PM +0100, J.A. Bezemer wrote: > > > One problem: cdimage.d.o does not do content negotiation, and even if it did > > I'd refuse to use it[*]. So a reference to just "faq" won't work, it has to > > be > > "faq.en.html". Is there any wml trick that can automagically add the > > ".<lang>.html" or do I have to hard-code it everywhere? > > > > [*]: It does not work, period. Many browsers have incorrect settings > > _per_default_, up to the point that I believe we're losing many Windows > > converts because they simply can't read our webpages. I don't want to be > > responsible for anything like that. > > There's nothing inherently wrong with content negotiation, and the current > implementation works just fine in a majority of cases. In cases where it > doesn't work, it mostly a user-error, and it can be worked around very > easily.
IMnsHO a "majority of cases" is a wrong attitude. It should work in _all_ cases, for all browsers with all settings. If we'd make a flash-only site, we'd still be supporting a majority of viewers, and the unsupported minority would need to make some adjustments to view the site properly. Why don't we do that? Exactly. By the way, I don't think you have any numbers on that "majority" since I'm not aware of any way that apache can produce them. I mean something like: IP address, hostname, URL requested, languages requested, actual page served. I'd surely like to see and analyse factual data like that. Furthermore I disagree that it's mostly a user error. Most users don't even know that there is such a thing as language preferences. They use settings their browser is shipped with (and/or are autodetected?). I've seen quite a few of these cases in debian-doc (I guess debian-www gets even more), for example http://lists.debian.org/debian-doc-0101/msg00025.html: In IE 5.5 the _default_ language is "English (United States) [en-us]". Once I changed that to "English [en]" everything worked fine. [...] I do appreciate learning something _new_. (my emphasis). Finally, the workaround (i.e. other than fixing the language preferences) of adding .en.html or /index.en.html is definately not easy in two aspects: 1) people don't know this workaround _exists_, and 2) you've got to add it _every_ _time_ you click on a link. The first is solved partly by the language list at the bottom of some pages, the second _can_ be solved partly by providing specific hrefs. > www.debian.org and all of its mirrors have been running Apache(s) with > content negotiation for years now. We get complaints from users who set up > their browsers incorrectly, all the time, and it obviously hasn't stopped > us, and I doubt it will. If you get complaints, you're doing something wrong. You're running a web-servant, not a web-dictator. > > > BTW, would you mind if I renamed ch* files to something nicer? It's not > > > really important, but it's easier to handle files that aren't so similarly > > > named. > > > > Well, if you have any good suggestion that increases manageability please > > tell me. And remember that I'm mostly using mc(1) to work on stuff, so the > > names should preferably have less than 16 and absolutely less than 37 > > characters (which makes it quite hard to think of good descriptive names > > for ch21211 for example). > > For example, "p-ikit" (short for pseudo-image kit). Or something along those > lines. Anything's better than combinations of numbers 1, 2 and 3... This won't help; there are four different pages directing to the Kit, how to distinguish them? And there are twelve different non-terminal pages, how to call them? I didn't know and still don't know, that's why I named them according to the _ch_oices made. Regards, Anne Bezemer
