> We have to understand the diagnostics from a variety of servers (not all
> Z39.50) and represent what happened to the end user in a consistent fashion.
> to the user. Thus the more specificity in machine readable form the better.

Yup.

> There is one other aspect of this which seems to have been missed entirely
> (or is handled in some clever way I'm missing) and that is multi-lingual
> forms of the user friendly text message. All the diagnostic user messages

They are intentionally not handled at all in SRW, as it's an impossible
burden on a server implementer to be able to return error condition
messages in different languages or targeted at different audiences.  A
server intended for use in Germany will probably return messages in
German, even though I might want to search it from the UK.  That's why we
have details and uri though, so that at the very least there's enough
information to reconstruct a generic error message in the appropriate
language for the user.

One suggestion which has been made to me recently was to maintain an XML
document or documents that listed translations of the messages into
different languages.  And while I'm not averse to the idea, I don't have
the skills to do the translations apart from into Latin, Old, Middle and
Modern French -- of which only one is at all useful and even then would be
stilted at best.


Rob

       ,'/:.          Dr Robert Sanderson ([log in to unmask])
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,'---/::::::::::.    University of Liverpool
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