Useful Online Help

The point of this short post is that including some help tool with your product is not enough. Help tools are supposed to be helpful, and in order to be helpful it must be easily understood. I think that's common sense.

So why, oh, why do so many vendors, even the big names, avoid investing that little bit extra effort in proof-reading instructions and documentation? This is a classic example. The equipment is a Cisco EPC3925 EuroDocsis 3.0 2-PORT Voice Gateway.

"IP Flood Detection is hacker intrusion method when massive amount of packets are send to the networking equipment with a purpose to overwhelm it.This can expose weaknesses or cause failures.Enabling this future is essential part if intrusion prevention."

This is just one example. The rest of the documentation runs along the same standards.

I mean... really... Cisco... come on... Yes, I can understand what the statement actually means, but is this English? I can appreciate that translation into English from other languages might not be straightforward, I know, that's fine, but are you really unable to find one... ONE... English native-like speaker that can proof-read this stuff? I'm pretty sure you can afford it.

Silly Application!

Note to self: always define in detail what parts of what file or resource in what module needs to be localised.
We have this JSF-based web application where the UI is a bunch of .xhtml files, and we sent it off for localisation through third parties.

Sure enough, they did a good job with the strings. We switch the locale, and everything comes up in a different language. Perfect. Then we noticed a bunch of forms would not submit any more, often throwing some javascript errors.

It didn't take long to find the problem: they had localised the names of the controls in the .xhtml files too!
Silly application! If it expects data from a control named "user" on an English locale, why can't it work out that on a French locale the data should be picked up from a control named "utilisateur" instead? :-)

M.