On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 12:23:06AM -0800, Anthere wrote:
On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 12:28:53PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
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? Your examples are legitimate. How would you feel if there was a user option to edit in "broken UTF-8 mode"? Then when you edited a page, you could insert some markup to put in non-ASCII characters. I don't know what the best way to do this would be; I am guessing something like \xAB\xCD where \x means "an 8 bit value in hexadecimal representation follows". If you have any other ideas, let me know.
Jonathan
This could not make it in french. We have accentuated letters in an awful number of words. That would make editing very difficult.
French accentuated letters are part of Latin-1, they could be edited directly. Only more foreign alphabetes would suffer. In an article about Lech Walesa you could not directly input the stroken-through "l" of his last name but would see something like ł
See for example http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=List_of_Polish_prime_ministers http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=China for a articles on the English wikipedia having those kind of letters.
A UTF-8 capable browser would present all letters directly in the edit window. A Non-UTF-8-browser would present the accentuated characters in a numeric form like it's already used in parts of the english wikipedia.
Making UTF-8 edits an option would ease the life of people working on Asian, eastern European, Hebrew ... topics while still allowing edits by older browsers.
Best regards,
JeLuF