On ven, 2003-01-10 at 11:45, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 11:22:43AM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
My position continues to be that we should not switch the big Latin-1 wikis to UTF-8 until we have automatic conversion to handle common broken browsers.
All common browsers support UTF-8, so what do you mean by "common broken browsers" ?
Oh, how I wish that were true. *Current* versions of the most common browsers support UTF-8, but older versions which are still used by actual, real, Wikipedia contributors whose complaints reach my ears and whose broken edits reach my eyes, are in fact broken.
"Common broken browsers" are the ones commonly turning up as broken. See http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta.wikipedia.org_technical_issues
This hits real people, including heavy contributors like Anthere; as for myself, I can't edit UTF-8 pages on the Macs in my university's computer lab without breaking the content, because they have only an old IE 5.0 and Netscape 4.x.
Autodetection won't work (all popular browsers, and most of less popular ones, support UTF-8, and we don't want to break any of them, list of broken browsers doesn't exist).
Checking the 'Accept-charset' header plus a blacklist of known bad user-agents should do well enough.
There should be a link "my browser is completely broken" which would set a cookie and software, seeing that cookie, would convert page to "safer" version.
Better to do the safer thing by default when we know we're going to need it.
But what would that "safer" version be ?
- ISO-8859-1 + &codes;
Ugly, but workable in most cases. (Or another base charset could be used for some languages.) Automatic conversion of input &codes; to UTF-8 storage internally would additionally help with searching.
- ISO-8859-1 + `?' marks
- ISO-8859-1 + rendered PNGs (do these browsers support PNG ?)
That would be useless for editing, which is the problem. A browser that won't _display_ UTF-8 text (whether able to show all the glyphs or not) is damn near impossible to find. (Some shitty text browsers may manage it.)
I don't think we should support editing that way.
What would you prefer? That we tell Anthere to take a hike and buy a new computer? That I petition my uni to upgrade hundreds of machines in their labs? That we ignore similar conditions across the world where people have old machines or machines they cannot control and tell them, hey, fuck off, Wikipedia's not for you you whiny bitch?
*I don't think so.*
We should make at least a good-faith effort to make our site usable. I don't mind so much of joe's buggy browser overlaps something in the header from time to time or has an ugly border look, but if it's damaging the content of our site because of bad interactions with editing, than that hurts the very core of what a wiki is about.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)