On 5/22/08, Pádraic Brady <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> <snip<
> By the way I agree - the default messages are horrendous and border on bad
> English. If I were not English speaking I'd suspect they were
> incomprehensible. There is a lot to be said for having defaults that are as
> simple and plain spoken as possible using natural English.
>
> Take Zend_Validate_Alpha. If an empty string is input you get the error
> message:
>     '%value%' is an empty string
>
> That's brilliant. The user now knows they input an empty string. We even
> print the empty string, just to clarify that the space between the single
> quotes is indeed....zero. When I saw this the first time I spent a few
> mintues trying to figure out if the joke was on me ;). What we haven't
> clarified is that it's not allowed to be an empty string. There's a subtle
> difference - one is a statement of fact, the other is advising of a
> problem.
> The single quotes may even be confusing by themselves.
>
> I ended up going off topic on this one ;). Maybe I'll tackle the default
> messages again as something for ZF 2.0 to consider.


Let alone the fact that, if I didn't do any scripting, as a non-native
speaker I wouldn't know what a "string" is... :)

Paddy



-- 
Vincent

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