On Tue, Nov 18, 2003 at 03:48:59PM -0800, Anthere wrote:

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Peter Gervai wrote: I see. First is not a good example, Opera 5 is _ancient_, you can't expect that anyone would support it, as upgrading is clearly painless.

This is NOT true. I tried upgrading to Opera 6, and it was unworkable, because it needed to much memory for my computer to handle it. Sure enough, I did not break anything any more, but the browser had great slowliness, and crashed on average every 30 mn. This is not precisely what I call *painless*

What was the memory footprint of opera 4,5 or whatever you use? What browser do you use regularly, under what operating system? How much memory do you have?

I just checked: opera 7.21 uses 35MB virtual (20MB resident) memory, I believe this is not outrageous for a graphical browser. (Latest opera is 6.03 for Mac as far as I see, but I won't downgrade mine.)

The upgrade is perfectly ok if you have a recent computer. But you cannot expect every user to have so. There was a big campaign about 4 years ago in France, and many many people bought some imacs.

That's a problem. I can't tell you about Mac browsers, apart from the fact that I see "Mac OS/X" (whatever it might be) in Mozilla download pages. Don't Mac have any more recent browsers than Opera 6.03 or Netscape 4.xx? (I see netscape 6.2.xx for MacPPC.)

since then. Except for wikipedia, I did not meet any problem with it, fine for power, fine for dvd, fine for internet.

I'm sure you going to have troubles with that "fine for internet" soon. dmoz.org is going to be changed to utf-8 "real soon now" (see http://dmoz.org/Test/World/ utf8 categories, like Catalan or Arabian), and most international project are either already utf-8 or going to be soon.

Natually you should be aware that french accents are in latin1, so you feel yourself comfortable. The rest of the world which ISN'T in latin1 going to change to utf-8 sooner or later (probably sooner), because we have to, otherwise we cannot handle our natural language and latin1 at once.

Just problem on wikipedia. And I bought a boosted one.

Can your browser edit utf-8 articles which does NOT contain non-latin1 characters?

I know it is not possible for these users to use Opera 6, and not possible to switch to system X.

I believe you, but then, they are in a dead end, and they can expect more and more problems as unicode gets used more widely. usemod wikis just being changed to utf-8, we'll see what happens.

Come: http://narya.grin.hu/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?UniCodeTest

Edit, enter your browser and opsys, and see what happens.

I do not understand that comment.

If the iso8859-1 encoded page contains illegal characters, it breaks if you edit it with a standards compliant browser.

French people suggested they could just by hand correct broken caracters. This is not an option I fear

I just made an example : this is what appear after my edit : http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorraine

Can you figure manually correcting each time after a user ?

Well, I'd revert it and tell the user to use a different browser. :-/

Okay, without much thinking:

If I were WikiGod I'd create a button "Send me latin1, I am lame", which would run page through

iconv -f utf-8 -t iso8859-1

then let the user edit, then have the "lame submit" button which would send the text through

iconv -t utf-8 -f iso8859-1

and save (change 8859-1 to any iso encoding you prefer). This would keep iso8859 representable characters.

The button would refuse if the page would contain a char not representable, and advise you to either look for other page or to really update that darned browser.

Not that I believed this is good or right. As I mentioned: you going to have lots of problems anyway.

I have the plain answer : I saw a couple of reaction on meta to my destructive edits; I was just reverted; I know very well that if we switch to utf-8 on all wikipedias without a technical tweak to automatically insure "translation", the user of this browser, perhaps just a mother at home with a 4 years old imac, perhaps a student in Algeria, perhaps a kid in Brasil, will just be kicked out.

Just get reverted. Probably it is even possible to reject your edits since they contain illegal utf-8 characters, which is probably possible to notice in even php.

Perhaps is it just 2%,

Only those who: 1) have their charset included in latin1 (the privileged) 2) keep their browser at least 2 years old.

and perhaps those editing wikipedia right now are people technically better equipped that the average human being connected to internet,

Definitely, if you count in the Albanian orphans and the chinese peasants.

Otherwise no. I can run opera well on a pentium 233 with 32 MB of memory (and on 16MB either, but it's much slower). How much is a P233 nowadays? $10? (convert to FFR at will :))

and perhaps we just do not want to keep it that way, and perhaps we want liberty and openess.

This would include supporting non iso-8859-1 people.

Depends on what is important.

Yes. But it is not that simple when you are in a privileged group.

Still, maybe en.wikipedia should stay 8859-1, since it's english after all.

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As far as I know most browsers handle this very well (including, for example, unix character mode browsers).

And perhaps most users know nothing about unix

Most end-users are using windoze, and it is well equipped with utf-8 conform browsers.

But maybe you're right, maybe english doesn't need utf-8. But to me it seems to be a big loss.

I stay silent, and let the old timers decide. If I can be any technical help, I'll start talking again.

Hoping the best, Peter