[Wikipedia-l] On browsers, UTF-8 and attitude.

[Daniel Mayer]

Ralesk wrote:
>Please!  Let's all return to the 6-bit ASCII set, 
>everything else is  bloat, and unsupported by 
>older systems. 

Nobody is advocating that - certainly not me. But where there are perfectly 
acceptable alternatives that are nearly universal (read: ASCII quotes and 
hyphens), then we should use those instead of slightly fancier alternatives. 

>Please, also, keep your Netscape 4 and watch it break 
>every standard and  recommendation that W3C proposed.  

I use Konqueror 3.1.3, which IIRC is more standards compliant the IE. However 
many people still use their pre-installed versions of Netscape 4 or whatnot  
because that is what came with their computer. Most of these people simply 
want their computer to do things for them; they don't care about things like 
browser versions and compatibility. Therefore, in their view, if a website 
they visit doesn't work on their browser their first thought is that the 
website is broken, not their browser. 

So if their browser works fine on a Latin-1 wiki as is, then why should we 
change things to 'break our website' for them? They may also not have the 
time, interest, confidence, hardware, bandwidth, OS version or permissions 
needed to upgrade. 

You shouldn't assume others are like you and don't mind upgrading things. Most 
people I know have /never/ upgraded /anything/! Everything comes 
pre-installed when they get a new computer. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)