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: this is too great! From:"Wing, Michael J" <mjwing -at- INGR -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 10 Nov 1997 13:12:09 -0600
> Check this out folks:
>
> HTML Help WorkShop just gave me an "unspecified error".
>
> So, in other words, the error cannot be identified. But how can the
> application detect an error that doesn't exist?
>
Since when does "unspecified" equate to "doesn't exist"?
Wouldn't the error message say "Non-existent Error"?
> To identify that an error has occured, the error has to be classified.
> If it's not, how can there be an error?
>
Because few applications are 100% stand-alone (otherwise, they
would have include their own windowing and command interpretation), an
unspecified error can result from conflicts with system dlls on which
the application may be dependent (such as the cmctl32.dll). The user
may have loaded another application which replaced/upgraded some common
dlls supplied with the operating system. Therefore, when HTML Help
WorkShop called a function from the common dll, it returned an error.
Because the application could not possible know anything about the
upgraded dll, it categorizes the error generically. You could analyze
an error dump, if so inclined, to find the conflict.
