IETF policy on encodings and languages

[nothien at uber.space]

John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:
> If you chose such a link, you'd in principle get all 40,000+ document
> links, since there are no restrictions.  But in fact you'd get an
> error page telling you that you asked for too many documents.  There
> will be a different link altogether for interactive search, where you
> would be asked using a 10 response to enter keywords from the metadata
> (language, author, title, Library of Congress subject classification,
> etc.)

You could just combine the two pages and return a 10 when no query
string is provided to advsearch.gmi.

> However, that's inherently less precise: if you provided keywords
> "Mark Twain", you'd get both books by him and books about him, such as
> _My Mark Twain_ by William Dean Howells.

So you provide no interactive way to create an advanced search filter,
and you are replacing it with an interactive way to create not an
advanced search filter.

> With so many pages to search, all the search terms are ANDed together:
> the more keywords, the less output to look through.  (I'm not sure
> what the upper limit on results will be: for Google it's 1000.)  You
> probably don't want all the works by one author anyhow: you want the
> ones you can read.

You could simply prioritize books written in the language of the
interface - so with the fr.gemguten.example.com/author/Jules%20Verne.gmi
page, French books would show up at the top.  But this solution doesn't
scale to finding books in an arbitrary language.

> The search engine doesn't know what the link looks like.  I suppose
> that could be passed in the query too: "...
> &linktext=Les%20oeuvres%20de%20Jules%20Verne%20en%20français", for
> example.

The server is smart enough to generate something along those lines on
its own.  Please don't make URLs that much longer.

> Fine as far as the error messages are concerned.  But just because you
> want a French interface, it doesn't necessarily mean you want to
> reject English or German books from the search.

Of course not.  The interface language is completely dissociated from
the actual content of the pages, it only affects the language they are
written in.

~aravk | ~nothien