Not found (but check in Japan)



  • Go here and look at the second hyperlink ("Microsoft's Official Guidelines for User Interface Design"). Don't follow it yet.

    Hover the mouse over the link and observe the URL. Looks pretty normal, right?

    Okay, now follow it. You end up at a page with... uh... well, maybe someone here can tell me what it actually says.



  •  What the hell? That's a badly misconfigured redirect. (Did someone in the Japanese MSDN team forget that the resource they were editing was used by all sites?) It's not even that particular URL, it's the redirect.

    Will show Japanese MSDN error page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/default.asp

    Works just fine: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx

    That's an.. interesting idea of maintaining backward URL compatibility. Of course, nobody on the MSDN team seems to believe in that anyway ;P



  • The broken url is [url]http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp[/url], and any variation thereon. On the other hand, [url]http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.aspx[/url] and [url]http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/[/url] work as expected.

    Unfortunately, there are many, many old links pointing to the ASP version....

    Edit: It appears that the problem was caused sometime in April... [url]http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&u=http://msdn.microsoft.com/ja-jp/cc527072.aspx[/url]



  • This is pretty much what it has to say 

     

    The old MSDN library is moving

    On April, 2008, the contents of the old MSDN library (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ja) have been moved to this site.

    In most cases, the old links have been redirected to the new site, but there are some cases in which this script won't work. Please change all your links to this new site (http://msdn.microsoft.com/ja-jp/library/).

    We apologize for this inconvenience and thank you for your understanding.

     

     

    Some 5 years ago, the MSDN had the option of choosing the language of your choice by using the 2-letter code after the http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/, so you could have http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ja for japanese, http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en for english, http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/es for spanish and so on.

    Then the "there's more than a culture than just the language" idea came to those guys at MS and decided to use the entire 2-letter-dash-2-letter culture codes for their sites, which so far has only been useful to distinguish en-us from en-gb and es-es from es-mx, as far as I know. The new sites had the language codes -before- the /library/ part, so it was then http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ instead of http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en/, and all the redirections worked perfectly.

    Except the japanese one. If you had the chance to visit the japanese MSDN 6 months ago, you'd notice that it was still the blue thingy from 5 years ago, including the old-style links. My guess is that they were finally forced to evolve and use the new layout and links, and someone thought that nobody was using old style links, so they could have a script that would convert anything that applied to http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/??/*.asp to http://msdn.microsoft.com/ja-jp/library/*.aspx (try http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/aa/hello.asp), which is expected NOT to work in many cases, so this page you see is the "I'm sorry, but I regret to tell you that the answer to your question is 404" in a very polite japanese.

     

    Mahoro 



  • Well, that was.. Interesting. Sadly my japanese doesn't go much further from asking where the bathroom is at the moment, so I have no lcue what it says.



  • @ZippoLag said:

    asking where the bathroom is at the moment
    The bathrooms move around in Japan?



  • @belgariontheking said:

    @ZippoLag said:

    asking where the bathroom is at the moment
    The bathrooms move around in Japan?

     

    Yes apparently.


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