From: Peter Gervai grin@tolna.net Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Switching everything to

Hi Peter, that was a long and interesting message.

I thought of perhaps adding a couple of words to complete what you wrote.

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.)

I will first reassure you, I finally found a solution with Netscape 7.02. Not perfect (slow in particular, and sometimes unexpectedly crash, but that was my best option). My mac is a 128 mo, and I use a bit of virtual memory. System 9.04. I can't check memory requirement of Opera 6. It was so desastrous I put it in the trashcan. Netscape 7 is currently at 53 Mo. Opera 5 is at 25 Mo. The system is at 34 Mo. IRC at nearly 1 Mo. And Photoshop is at 47 Mo...hum...I would have said Photoshop would require more than Netscape. Curious. But no images are open. I get in trouble when on top I open QuarkXPress and Canvas :-)

...

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.)

OS 9 is the previous system. X is the new one. Requires quite a bit of memory. Running system X on my computer would be problematic. Many machines are still in OS 9. Opera 6 is the most recent one. Netscape 7 as well. And there are plenty of good browsers, but they work only on X. The jump between 9 and X was ...well... it is really different.

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.

As I said, I solved the problem. What I fear is that most people I know who bought macintosh around 3 to 4 years, are usually quite "unable" with computers, and have no idea how to upgrade a browser or a system. They really do not. It is no joke. These people use the computer they brought from the shop, and they do not change anything on it, unless they have a nephew able to fix the stuff for them. They will keep the computer as is, till the they change it because the dvd reader is dead because kids put chewing gum in it.

These people are also our public. Better even, as far as I am concerned, they are the people I try to reach to be editors.

Also, some people only have access to computers in public libraries (there are two in my city...computers in the main library I mean...not much he ?), or in school (there are more in my kids school than in the library).

Most of these computers are *not* changed very often (understatement). Even in universities. Students do not pay very expensive fees for their studies, the drawback is that material is not great, not replaced often.

Though I am quite a joke in computer stuff, I was the one who explain my daughter teacher how to use her computer last year; she have some pedagogic games for the kids on it. Good stuff. The least I can say, the computer was not brand new...but it was connected to internet. Just seeing how she approached the "thing", I can tell you she won't upgrade the stuff. Which does not mean she will not show the kids great stuff.

But I think she, and the kids, are also our public, and perhaps our editors.

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.

They are not in a dead end, they are just "old" computers. Newer ones do not have problems.

Come:

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

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

I did. Of course, this will work well, since my browser is now working.

Peter, *my* problem is solved now, or I promise I would be screaming with the idea of switching the french wikipedia utf 8 *now*.

All what I say is that there are still people with these, and I really do not feel like telling them, "go away". That is all I mean.

...

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.

I did a good old edit with my favorite browser on your test page as well :-))))

...

...

Can you figure manually correcting each time

after >a

...

user ?

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

I understand. This is not a good option to my opinion, but I am sure Brion and co will find a good solution that will be acceptable to all of us :-)

...

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.

Hum...about 6 months ago, I was at the technical level of an albanian orphan then :-)

I could perhaps launch a subscription for a new computer ?

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 :))

Peter...we are in euros...

Peter...I have no idea what a P233 is. I suppose memory. But in truth, Peter, some people just *do not know anything* about all this.

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

I would regret it if we gave another motive for windows to win over other systems :-)

I stay silent, and let the old timers decide. If I

can

be any technical help, I'll start talking again.

I do as well, because I can't help at all :-(

Hoping the best, Peter

Thanks Peter :-)

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