> -----Original Message-----
> From: Z39.50 Next-Generation Initiative [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of
> Matthew J. Dovey
> Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2004 1:53 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: diagnostic examples - revisited
>
>
> > 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
> > were quoted in English, not entirely surprisingly.
>
> I did suggest that the message element had an lang attribute to indicate
> the language code (either mandatory or taken to be English if omitted).
> I didn't think this would over burden the server developer too much (as
> he/she could just return lang="eng" or whatever standard language codes
> we adopted). However, it didn't meet with any support at the time...
>
This would be helpful, but I agree with Rob that this is not a question the
server wants to be burdened with, and it probably doesn't have the
information to determine what the user wants language-wise. This is
particularly true if a metasearch engine has got in the way and generated
the whole message to the server. So we handle this ourselves when we are the
UI part of the system - we hold the message_code/message_text(language)
table and insert text as appropriate. Basically we do/will ignore the
returned message text in the live situation. Of course we have a user
profile which tells us directly what language they want.

Peter



> Matthew
>