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