Re: Correction for links in documentations
On Wed, Sep 06, 2000 at 08:22:16AM -0400, Laurent Hubert wrote:
> Hello,
>
> It's a pleasure to see that the documentation is now update to "potato".
> And that "potato" meet it's promises to work with PowerPC. In my case
> PowerPC 604 (Motorola's PowerStack).
>
> Nevertheless, please take note that at the page
> http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/powerpc/release-notes/ch-installing.en.html
>
> The link http://www.debian.org/releases/2.2/powerpc/install
> lead to a page that is in a language that is not english, french or spanish.
the debian website has 'content negotiation' enabled, which is
fancy-schmancy terminology meaning "we try to figure out if we
can serve a document tailored to your needs (or to match your
settings, anyhow) instead of just serving a generic html page."
for example, if you have your browser settings include "i accept
italian, greek, serbo-croatian and martian language documents" then
every request it sends to every web server includes a header
Accept-Language: it,el,sh,et
('et' really means estonian, but i couldn't resist.) for a more
comprehensive list of available language codes, pop over to
http://www.unicode.org/unicode/onlinedat/languages.html .
when the debian webserver sees this "accept-language" header in
your request, it will try to serve you an html document that's
written in one of those languages. this extra work can be taxing,
so most webservers have it disabled by default. but debian is
an international, global effort, so they turn it on to make it
easier for other folks to see what's happening and come aboard.
note -- languages are separate from nations, as most of us know.
english is spoken in britain, australia, the u.s.a. (except for
new jersey) and in most of canada for example. in switzerland,
on the other hand, most folks can speak english, deutsch,
sweitze-deutsch [sp?], italian and french. so the top level
domains (uk, au, us, ca) are only distantly related to the
language codes.
behind-the-scenes, it works like this: the abbreviation for
english is 'en', and french is 'fr', german (i.e. deutschland)
is 'de' and so forth: so debian has several index.*.html dox:
index.en.html
index.fr.html
index.de.html
and when your browser asks for index.html, the web server is
also told which languages your browser accepts, and displays
the first one to match on of your selected lanaguages.
there's also a default
index.html
which is written in english (and there's a bit of discussion
as to whether it should be flavored for american or british
palettes) which is what's served when your browser isn't
set to specify any particular language, or when your language
preference doesn't match any of the languages available on
the server.
[you're NOT the first to run into this and think something
is screwy with the website. i just checked the link you
posted and it came across in english for me. in netscape,
my preferences are under edit menu -> preferences ->
navigator -> languages; mine are set for english (en),
english-united states (en-US), english-united kingdom (en-GB),
and french (fr). someday i'll see a french page and forget
that i asked for it!]
if you want to volunteer to translate any webpages into, say,
mongolian, we'll be able to create (and serve) *.mn.html pages
to anyone who needs them! kinda cool, eh?
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