On Fri, 20 Jul 2007, John Rudd "@ucsc.edu" wrote:
> Jonas Eckerman wrote:
>
> > What do they think will happen when someone who doesn't know english
> > tries to send to a user of such a system that outputs english error
> > mesages that directs the sender to web pages with english instructions?
>
> One possibility is, it could just spit out a url, with no other text,
> and assume that the sender will understand that they're intended to view
> the URL to find out why the message was rejected.
Umm, if -you- got a message that you didn't expect written in a language
that you couldn't read which contained a link, would you click on it?
It's hard enough trying to teach safe internet usage to our Lusers, now
I have to go and tell them "in this -one- particular case just do it"?
> If the site which rejected the message is multi-lingual, then they can
> have the resulting webpage offer multiple translations.
>
> If they're not multi-lingual, and only speak english, then there wasn't
> any point in the non-english speaker trying to contact them, was there? :-)
OK, and the IT staff a some-big-name university speaks all the languages
that their constituents/visitors speak? I would be surprised if you
didn't have some people on your campus who couldn't speak English.
> Though, I would also point out that it seems most such error messages
> are in english anyway. But there's no necessity, in what's been
> described so far, that the web page the URL leads to would be english only.
Do you mean to tell me that you've never gotten any "mailer-daemon"
messages from China, Russia, etc that you couldn't read?
I've seen cases where even the SMTP conversation was in encoded
Chinese. Asian countries are fast becoming the largest community on
the net.
This is not meant as a criticism, just to point out that simplistic
'solutions' often run into the reality buzz-saw.
--
Dave Funk University of Iowa
<dbfunk (at) engineering.uiowa.edu> College of Engineering
319/335-5751 FAX: 319/384-0549 1256 Seamans Center
Sys_admin/Postmaster/cell_admin Iowa City, IA 52242-1527
#include <std_disclaimer.h>
Better is not better, 'standard' is better. B{
