Re: Still problems with the main ocaml web page

Re: Still problems with the main ocaml web page

[Martin Sandin]

Erik de Castro Lopo skrev:
> On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 22:43:17 +1000
> Erik de Castro Lopo <ocaml-erikd@mega-nerd.com> 

<snip>

> which means that the server is OK and that the
problem must be in my
> browser.

Might be, might be. But it's a problem you share with
each of the 3 Internet Explorer copies (ie 3 windows
machines) I've tried to use to access the site. If the
problem is specific to me, please tell me and ignore
what I've written below.

The site works fine in Opera and Mozilla, and is a lot
nicer than the old, but it doesn't work in IE. The
fact that Windows isn't the no 1 priority of the OCaml
team, or the community, is both obvious (witness the
lack of 3.08.3 binaries for Windows) and
understandable. But I am still surprised that it was
even considered acceptable to release a site which
entierly excludes the 80+% majority browser (figure is
likely to be lower in the dev community, but no way
less than 50%). I always thought OCaml at least wanted
to grow, I sure do want it to, a popular language
brings many desirable advantages, and that a new site
would help in this regard (image is important, after
all). But while the new site looks (and more
importantly, works) better it can only be viewed by
those who already know to look for substance over
flash (gross generalization) and often prefer sparse
sites. The young and impressionable ones will miss it
entierly and the more market oriented ones will not be
interested in something which looks practically dead
(or completly oblivious to marketing, which is much
the same). In what way this situation is to be
considered an improvement in general, and for whom, I
don't know.

I know you are all overworked and not web design
people. I know promotion and popularity are fairly low
priority items, which is part of the reason you've
been able to bring us this extremly versatile
language. But the now practical lack of a real web
presence for OCaml denies the language, you, and us
all, to even have a shot. I really prefer not to
whine, and this post came out a whole lot more
negative than I wished, but I want to use OCaml a lot
more in the future. Thanks.


Martin









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Re: [Caml-list] Re: Still problems with the main ocaml web page

[Yaron Minsky]

For what it's worth, I just tried the site with ie 6.0.2800.1106, and
it works fine as far as I can tell.

Yaron


On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 06:19:49 -0800 (PST), Martin Sandin
<om_sandin@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Erik de Castro Lopo skrev:
> > On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 22:43:17 +1000
> > Erik de Castro Lopo <ocaml-erikd@mega-nerd.com>
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > which means that the server is OK and that the
> problem must be in my
> > browser.
> 
> Might be, might be. But it's a problem you share with
> each of the 3 Internet Explorer copies (ie 3 windows
> machines) I've tried to use to access the site. If the
> problem is specific to me, please tell me and ignore
> what I've written below.
> 
> The site works fine in Opera and Mozilla, and is a lot
> nicer than the old, but it doesn't work in IE. The
> fact that Windows isn't the no 1 priority of the OCaml
> team, or the community, is both obvious (witness the
> lack of 3.08.3 binaries for Windows) and
> understandable. But I am still surprised that it was
> even considered acceptable to release a site which
> entierly excludes the 80+% majority browser (figure is
> likely to be lower in the dev community, but no way
> less than 50%). I always thought OCaml at least wanted
> to grow, I sure do want it to, a popular language
> brings many desirable advantages, and that a new site
> would help in this regard (image is important, after
> all). But while the new site looks (and more
> importantly, works) better it can only be viewed by
> those who already know to look for substance over
> flash (gross generalization) and often prefer sparse
> sites. The young and impressionable ones will miss it
> entierly and the more market oriented ones will not be
> interested in something which looks practically dead
> (or completly oblivious to marketing, which is much
> the same). In what way this situation is to be
> considered an improvement in general, and for whom, I
> don't know.
> 
> I know you are all overworked and not web design
> people. I know promotion and popularity are fairly low
> priority items, which is part of the reason you've
> been able to bring us this extremly versatile
> language. But the now practical lack of a real web
> presence for OCaml denies the language, you, and us
> all, to even have a shot. I really prefer not to
> whine, and this post came out a whole lot more
> negative than I wished, but I want to use OCaml a lot
> more in the future. Thanks.
> 
> 
> Martin
> 
> 
> __________________________________________________
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> Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management:
> http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list
> Archives: http://caml.inria.fr
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> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>

Re: [Caml-list] Re: Still problems with the main ocaml web page

[Christopher Campbell]

Martin Sandin wrote:
> Erik de Castro Lopo skrev:
> 
>>On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 22:43:17 +1000
>>Erik de Castro Lopo <ocaml-erikd@mega-nerd.com> 
> 
> 
> <snip>
> 
>>which means that the server is OK and that the
> 
> problem must be in my
> 
>>browser.
> 
> 
> Might be, might be. But it's a problem you share with
> each of the 3 Internet Explorer copies (ie 3 windows
> machines) I've tried to use to access the site. If the
> problem is specific to me, please tell me and ignore
> what I've written below.
> 
> The site works fine in Opera and Mozilla, and is a lot
> nicer than the old, but it doesn't work in IE. The
> fact that Windows isn't the no 1 priority of the OCaml
> team, or the community, is both obvious (witness the
> lack of 3.08.3 binaries for Windows) and
> understandable. 

I found this...

http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/content-type.html

It suggests IE may interpret the xhtml document sent as "text/html" as 
XML not HTML if it doesn't encounter <html> close to the top of the 
page.  It ignores the mime type. :(

What versions of IE are you running?


Regards,
Chris

Re: [Caml-list] Re: Still problems with the main ocaml web page

[Xavier Leroy]

> The site works fine in Opera and Mozilla, and is a lot
> nicer than the old, but it doesn't work in IE. The
> fact that Windows isn't the no 1 priority of the OCaml
> team, or the community, is both obvious (witness the
> lack of 3.08.3 binaries for Windows) and
> understandable. But I am still surprised that it was
> even considered acceptable to release a site which
> entierly excludes the 80+% majority browser (figure is
> likely to be lower in the dev community, but no way
> less than 50%).

Of course the new site was tested with IE, and it works just fine on
my Windows installation.  Something is happening that 1- we don't
understand, and 2- we can't reproduce.  Another user suggested this
might have to do with language preferences in the browser, which could
expose a problem in content (language) negociation between the browser
and server.  Any constructive advice on how to attack this problem is
most welcome.

Concerning 3.08.3 binaries for Windows, please keep the following in
mind.  We have volunteers who do a great job of packaging binaries for
various flavors of Linux.  Other Unix users just compile from sources
and don't complain.  Doligez does the MacOS X binaries, but that's
because he uses MacOS X for all his computing.  It's only for Windows
that I haven't found anyone to prepare the binary packages in my
place.  So, yes, you'll have to wait till I don't have anything more
urgent to do, and that will probably take several weeks.  If you're
unhappy about that, why don't you build a binary distribution
yourself?  I'll be extremely grateful.

- Xavier Leroy

Re: [Caml-list] Re: Still problems with the main ocaml web page

[Dimitri Timofeev]

Hello!

Xavier Leroy wrote:

>Of course the new site was tested with IE, and it works just fine on
>my Windows installation.  Something is happening that 1- we don't
>understand, and 2- we can't reproduce.  Another user suggested this
>might have to do with language preferences in the browser, which could
>expose a problem in content (language) negociation between the browser
>and server.  Any constructive advice on how to attack this problem is
>most welcome.
>  
>
It seems that this problem may be related with Accept-Language HTTP 
header what is set
by browser according to the user language preferences. I'm using Firefox 
1.0.2 (Windows XP),
and when I add English or French to the list of preferred languages, 
OCaml site works very
well. But if I don't specify none of these, I get 'unknown/unknown' 
content type.

It seems that caml.inria.fr web server can't handle the situation where 
none of supported
languages (English, French) is specified in Accept-Language header. 
Maybe the best solution
would be to change web server configuration and to make it behave just 
like Accept-Language="en"
when Accept-Language is not specified or does not contain 'en' nor 'fr'.

As a workaround, it is easy to us users to set up our browsers to 
request content in
English or French in addition to our favorite languages :). This 
workaround works not
only for Mozilla Firefox, but for MS IE too (at least version 6.0).

Thank you for the excellent work you do!
OCaml is a very good and useful language, and new OCaml site looks 
really nice!

-- 
Dimitri

Re: [Caml-list] Re: Still problems with the main ocaml web page

[Eijiro Sumii]

From: "Xavier Leroy" <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr>
> Of course the new site was tested with IE, and it works just fine on
> my Windows installation.  Something is happening that 1- we don't
> understand, and 2- we can't reproduce.  Another user suggested this
> might have to do with language preferences in the browser, which could
> expose a problem in content (language) negociation between the browser
> and server.  Any constructive advice on how to attack this problem is
> most welcome.

Perhaps I am that user:-) but anyway, I reported the same problem with
MS IE on Japanese Windows to webmaster@brion.inria.fr on March 18 with
the log below.

Although I'm not an expert, the problem apparently seems to be in the
configuration of your apache (or each .htaccess), to which I
unfortunately don't have access...

In any case, the "Language Negotiation Exceptions" section in the
following document might help.

  http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/en/content-negotiation.html

----------------------------------------------------------------------
> telnet caml.inria.fr http
Trying 128.93.11.23...
Connected to brion.inria.fr.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.1
HOST: caml.inria.fr
Accept-Language: ja

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2005 19:21:26 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Debian GNU/Linux) mod_ssl/2.0.52 OpenSSL/0.9.7e
Content-Location: index.xml
Vary: negotiate,accept,accept-language
TCN: choice
Last-Modified: Fri, 18 Mar 2005 13:36:27 GMT
ETag: "11006c-1b03-7714ccc0"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 6915
Content-Type: unknown/unknown

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
...snip...
----------------------------------------------------------------------

webmaster@caml.inria.fr is not a "legal" mail address (Re: [Caml-list] Re: Still problems with the main ocaml web page)

[Eijiro Sumii]

P.S.

From: Eijiro Sumii <eijiro_sumii@anet.ne.jp>
> I reported the same problem with MS IE on Japanese Windows to
> webmaster@brion.inria.fr on March 18

In fact,

  http://caml.inria.fr/contact.en.html

shows the address

  mailto:webmaster@caml.inria.fr

but I doubt that it is legial according to RFC, since caml.inria.fr is
CNAME in the DNS.  Indeed, my server at Penn rewrites it to
brion.inria.fr in order to conform to the standard.

Of course, the same problem exists in all addresses at caml.inria.fr.

	Eijiro

Re: [Caml-list] Re: Still problems with the main ocaml web page

[Marc Herbert]

On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, Dimitri Timofeev wrote:

> Xavier Leroy wrote:
>
> >Of course the new site was tested with IE, and it works just fine on
> >my Windows installation.  Something is happening that 1- we don't
> >understand, and 2- we can't reproduce.  Another user suggested this
> >might have to do with language preferences in the browser, which could
> >expose a problem in content (language) negociation between the browser
> >and server.  Any constructive advice on how to attack this problem is
> >most welcome.

> It seems that this problem may be related with Accept-Language HTTP
> header what is set by browser according to the user language
> preferences. I'm using Firefox 1.0.2 (Windows XP), and when I add
> English or French to the list of preferred languages, OCaml site
> works very well. But if I don't specify none of these, I get
> 'unknown/unknown' content type.

I just made a few tests and network captures and I confirm this
accurate diagnostic with Firefox 1.0.3 on linux Debian woody as well
as with Opera 7.54 on linux Fedora Core 2.

Congratulations to Dimitri and others for finding out the issue so
quickly. Great work.


> As a workaround, it is easy to us users to set up our browsers to
> request content in English or French in addition to our favorite
> languages :). This workaround works not only for Mozilla Firefox,
> but for MS IE too (at least version 6.0).

Another workaround was fine for me: set up your browser with NO
favorite language at all (and so no Accept-Language: header is sent at
all).


> Thank you for the excellent work you do!
> OCaml is a very good and useful language, and new OCaml site looks
> really nice!

Agreed.

Re: webmaster@caml.inria.fr is not a "legal" mail address (Re: [Caml-list] Re: Still problems with the main ocaml web page)

[Francis Dupont]

 In your previous mail you wrote:

   From: Eijiro Sumii <eijiro_sumii@anet.ne.jp>
   > I reported the same problem with MS IE on Japanese Windows to
   > webmaster@brion.inria.fr on March 18
   
   In fact,
   
     http://caml.inria.fr/contact.en.html
   
   shows the address
   
     mailto:webmaster@caml.inria.fr
   
   but I doubt that it is legial according to RFC, since caml.inria.fr is
   CNAME in the DNS.

=> aliases (CNAME left parts) are legal in mail addresses.

   Indeed, my server at Penn rewrites it to
   brion.inria.fr in order to conform to the standard.
   
=> it rewrites it because it checkes it and gets the canonical name as
a side effect, not because aliases are not legal...

Francis.Dupont@enst-bretagne.fr

PS: alias is a DNS concept, SMTP requires valid names (aliases or canonical
names) with a restriction in the character set (only digits, letters and
the character "-" not in the first position) for labels (names are made up
by labels separated by dots). Note that SMTP does not require the name
exists...

Re: webmaster@caml.inria.fr is not a "legal" mail address

[Eijiro Sumii]

From: Francis Dupont <Francis.Dupont@enst-bretagne.fr>
> => aliases (CNAME left parts) are legal in mail addresses.

But RFC 1123 says as below, for example...?  For more details, see
also

  http://www.exim.org/pipermail/exim-users/Week-of-Mon-20030203/049446.html

for instance.  In short, it does no "harm" in _most_ environments, but
affects many systems at least.  (I wonder what Dmitry meant by
"webmaster@caml.inria.fr is not routable"...)

----------------------------------------------------------------------
5.2.2  Canonicalization: RFC-821 Section 3.1

         The domain names that a Sender-SMTP sends in MAIL and RCPT
         commands MUST have been  "canonicalized," i.e., they must be
         fully-qualified principal names or domain literals, not
         nicknames or domain abbreviations.  A canonicalized name either
         identifies a host directly or is an MX name; it cannot be a
         CNAME.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

> => it rewrites it because it checkes it and gets the canonical name as
> a side effect, not because aliases are not legal...

As explained above, they were illegal in MAIL and RCPT commands of
SMTP, at least.  Of course, you could argue that bodies (From: and
To:) may be different from envelopes (MAIL and RCPT), though.

The bottom line is that it is still a bad practice to use aliases in
mail address domains for these reasons.  Instead, we can just use A
records in most cases.

> PS: alias is a DNS concept, SMTP requires valid names (aliases or canonical
> names) with a restriction in the character set (only digits, letters and
> the character "-" not in the first position) for labels (names are made up
> by labels separated by dots). Note that SMTP does not require the name
> exists...

Grrr...:-)

Best regards,

	Eijiro

Re: webmaster@caml.inria.fr is not a "legal" mail address

[Francis Dupont]

 In your previous mail you wrote:

   From: Francis Dupont <Francis.Dupont@enst-bretagne.fr>
   > => aliases (CNAME left parts) are legal in mail addresses.
   
   But RFC 1123 says as below, for example...?

=> you mix up the MTA (which canonizes when it can *) and the MUA
(which should accept any valid name).
(* in RFC 821 section 3.7, not in RFC 2821 which was written after
a real DNS practice).

     http://www.exim.org/pipermail/exim-users/Week-of-Mon-20030203/049446.html
   
=> you still mix up MTAs and MUAs. In fact, you suggest *your* MTA is
wrong (:-)!

   (I wonder what Dmitry meant by
   "webmaster@caml.inria.fr is not routable"...)
   
=> me too.

   ----------------------------------------------------------------------
   5.2.2  Canonicalization: RFC-821 Section 3.1
   
=> note this is in section 3.7, not 3.1

            The domain names that a Sender-SMTP sends in MAIL and RCPT
            commands MUST have been  "canonicalized," i.e., they must be
            fully-qualified principal names or domain literals, not
            nicknames or domain abbreviations.  A canonicalized name either
            identifies a host directly or is an MX name; it cannot be a
            CNAME.
   ----------------------------------------------------------------------
   
   > => it rewrites it because it checkes it and gets the canonical name as
   > a side effect, not because aliases are not legal...
   
   As explained above, they were illegal in MAIL and RCPT commands of

=> but they are not more illegal. BTW the Sender-SMTP is likely a MTA.
Today the canonization is considered only as useful (if it is not performed,
the next MTA will have to resolve the alias again) but no more as mandatory
or necessary.

   SMTP, at least.  Of course, you could argue that bodies (From: and
   To:) may be different from envelopes (MAIL and RCPT), though.
   
=> I argue that your MUA should accept what you give as soon as it is
valid and it knows what to do with it.

   The bottom line is that it is still a bad practice to use aliases in
   mail address domains for these reasons.

=> not only it is not a bad practice (the first agent on the path can
resolve the alias, before RFC 2821 it was the first agent using SMTP at
its sending side) but it is a very common practice. What do you believe
aliases are for?

   Instead, we can just use A records in most cases.
   
=> I don't understand this comment about A RRs (do you suggest to use
only litterals?)

   > Note that SMTP does not require the name exists...
   
   Grrr...:-)
   
=> IMHO MX RRs are a nice idea. With HTTP 1.1 virtual hosting they are
more than necessary!

Regards

Francis.Dupont@enst-bretagne.fr

PS: for other readers: MTA = Mail Transfer Agent, MUA = Mail User Agent.
A MTA is the software which puts mails from node to node, a MUA is the
software which we use to read and write mails. SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer
Protocol) is the protocol used between MTAs even it may be used to submit
mails (i.e., from the MUA to the first MTA).

[OT] Re: webmaster@caml.inria.fr is not a "legal" mail address

[Eijiro Sumii]

Sorry for the off-topic discussion - I didn't expect it to take so
long...!

>    But RFC 1123 says as below, for example...?
> 
> => you mix up the MTA (which canonizes when it can *) and the MUA
> (which should accept any valid name).

I've always been talking about MTA and never said anything about MUA
in this thread.  Maybe my wording "illegal mail address" caught your
eyes - I should perhaps have said "causing confusion to a major MTA"
or something.

I also quoted the word "legal" in the first place, meaning that at
least some MTAs (such as many configurations of sendmail, i.e., those
with "O DontExpandCnames=False" which is the *default* in many
versions) indeed rewrite CNAME addresses, not only in envelopes but
also in contents, which is well-known to cause confusion.

> => you still mix up MTAs and MUAs. In fact, you suggest *your* MTA is
> wrong (:-)!

Well, as I wrote above, I've never talked about any MUA - I wrote "my
server at Penn" in my first message on this topic.  I agree that one
can argue that some versions/configurations of sendmail are wrong, but
they are very common at least.

>    (I wonder what Dmitry meant by
>    "webmaster@caml.inria.fr is not routable"...)
>    
> => me too.

Hey, you are _so_ picky about his words in your reply...!:-)

| => no E-mail address is routable... What do you mean ? The host
| caml.inria.fr is routable, i.e., the host which has the (alias) name
| caml.inria.fr has a routable IP address (128.93.11.23).

> => but they are not more illegal. BTW the Sender-SMTP is likely a MTA.
> Today the canonization is considered only as useful (if it is not performed,
> the next MTA will have to resolve the alias again) but no more as mandatory
> or necessary.

I can agree that they are no longer stated as illegal in RFC 2821, but
they were in RFC 821 (and 1123) - and there are still many systems
which conform to the latter.

> => I argue that your MUA should accept what you give as soon as it is
> valid and it knows what to do with it.

I agree, but again I've never talked about any MUA.

>    The bottom line is that it is still a bad practice to use aliases in
>    mail address domains for these reasons.
> 
> => not only it is not a bad practice (the first agent on the path can
> resolve the alias, before RFC 2821 it was the first agent using SMTP at
> its sending side) but it is a very common practice. What do you believe
> aliases are for?

I've never said (or even thought) that aliases are bad by themselves -
I'm just saying that aliases *in the "domain" part of mail addresses*
often cause confusion for the reasons above.  You can find many tips
on this issue if you google "sendmail CNAME" or something.  We might
call it a bug of some versions/configurations of sendmail, but they
happen to be still common, unfortunately.

> => I don't understand this comment about A RRs (do you suggest to use
> only litterals?)

> => IMHO MX RRs are a nice idea. With HTTP 1.1 virtual hosting they are
> more than necessary!

Oh, MX is just fine for me, too!:-) Again, I'm just saying that CNAME
domains used in mail addresses are known to be problematic at least in
practice, and I don't think that such uses are so common as you said -
I've only experienced this problem a few times in my billions of
e-mail exchanges for >10 years, even though there are many MTAs with
this problem.  Perhaps my wording "legal/illegal" wasn't correct with
respect to the latest RFC, though.

Best regards,

	Eijiro

Re: [OT] Re: webmaster@caml.inria.fr is not a "legal" mail address

[Eijiro Sumii]

P.S.  Whoever is curious on what I'm talking about can try a session
like below, and see the From: field of the message delivered to you.
(The same phenomenon happens to To: and Cc: fields, of course, but you
cannot test it without bothering the real server at caml.inria.fr.:-)

The result is "From: nosuchuser@brion.inria.fr" in all sendmail
                                ^^^^^
installations that I have access to.  One can also try:

> grep DontExpandCnames /etc/mail/sendmail.cf
O DontExpandCnames=False
> 

	Eijiro

----------------------------------------------------------------------
> telnet YOUR.SMTP.SERVER smtp
Trying aaa.bbb.ccc.xxx...
Connected to your.smtp.server (aaa.bbb.ccc.xxx).
Escape character is '^]'.
220 your.smtp.server ESMTP
helo YOUR.HOST.NAME
250 your.smtp.server Hello your.host.name [aaa.bbb.ccc.yyy], pleased to meet you
mail from: nosuchuser@caml.inria.fr
250 2.1.0 nosuchuser@caml.inria.fr... Sender ok
rcpt to: YOUR_USER_NAME@YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME
250 2.1.5 your_user_name@your_domain_name... Recipient ok
data
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
test
.
250 2.0.0 j2VJmv1a026374 Message accepted for delivery
quit
221 2.0.0 your.smtp.server closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.