TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:Re: Writing error messages? Take II From:iain -at- hairydog -dot- co -dot- uk (Iain Harrison) To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com Date:Thu, 2 Mar 2000 15:09 +0000 (GMT Standard Time)
> <<I don't think that I have ever seen that message [Abort, retry, fail]
> without a preceding line that tells me what has gone wrong. Something
> like:
> Drive a: not ready Abort, retry, fail?>>
>
> Sorry, I was imprecise. Without a _useful_ description of what has gone
> wrong. Why isn't the drive ready? Is it broken? Is it busy? Is it not
> responding for some unknown reason? Did it complete part of the task I
> asked
> it to do and the fail midway along?
The point here is that this is an OS message, not an application error
message, and the OS doesn't have that level of detail to pass on. The
request goes to the disk drive, and it responds "not ready". Giving more
information would be speculation.
An application programmer ought to capture these messages and add helpful
stuff, but that's not the OS' job.
--
Iain
iain -at- hairydog -dot- co -dot- uk
iainh -at- cix -dot- co -dot- uk
