[Vorbis] Can't access www.xiph.org from Japan

[Ralph Giles]

On Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 09:28:10AM +0100, Ian Malone wrote:
> <begin RFC>
>       Note: HTTP/1.1 servers are allowed to return responses which are
>       not acceptable according to the accept headers sent in the
>       request. In some cases, this may even be preferable to sending a
>       406 response. User agents are encouraged to inspect the headers of
>       an incoming response to determine if it is acceptable.

Ok, so the fallback option is valid. The apache documentation doesn't
say one way or the other, but we were using the default config.

> I agree with Christopher Bouevthat making the warning more human
> friendly would be worthwhile:
> Sorry, the Xiph.org homepage is [only available in English/not available
> in xxx] and your browser [does not list this as an acceptable option/
> will not accept this option].  The English version is available at...

Yes, and as you imply, to be really effective, this message should be
localized to one of the UA's acceptable languages. That would make
for the most effective activism for browser cleanup, I think.

> Finally I'd like to say I think the OP is being constructive, even if
> Xiph does decide to retain the current behaviour.  This is something
> which doesn't seem to have been considered deeply.

I have thought about it quite a bit. It's true we don't have so much
besides English at this point, but we'd like to have site translations,
and adding support for this was part of the site redesign.

Normally we're quite spiky about whose bug should be fixed, but in
this case I agree with the OP's suggestion. The idea that 'english 
should be in everyone's language list' is flawed: either Enlish has a 
privileged position, or everyone has to add *all* languages to their 
list, just at lower priorities, which isn't tenable. Returning 406 when 
the browser asks for png or jpeg and all you have is a tiff is different 
from returning an error instead of a page the user can see but may not 
be able to read.

We've made the change on westfish and eu.xiph.org; the au mirror
will take longer.

 -r