On ven, 2002-03-08 at 04:07, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
On Thu, Mar 07, 2002 at 11:34:53PM -0800, Brion L. VIBBER wrote:
On ??a??, 2002-03-07 at 22:07, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
Just see articles about anything Japanese on English Wikipedia. They contain Japanese names of everything.
Sure, but more often kanji than kana, so special kana markup wouldn't be that big a win. See the thread "International Upgrades"; the vague plan is to standardise the internal character set and present the wikipedias in Unicode to capable browsers. (Please comment!)
Uhm, right. But most non-japanese people don't know names of too many kanjis, so kanjis aren't that important. ;) On the other hand more people that it is usually though know kana, so it might be beneficial for them.
But, what are people who don't know much Japanese going to _do_ with kana?
Speaking as someone with a very very poor command of the Japanese language, my own usage of Japanese characters on the non-Japanese wikipedias is limited to: * Demonstration of japanese characters in articles about the language * Showing the local form of a place, personal, or other name in articles about Japan and Japanese culture
The former are a limited genre (Jimbo's "special case"), and the latter are overwhelmingly kanji.
Hmmm. Now I think that some general method would be more useful: &katakana_a; &kanji_b; &hebrew_c; or &cyrilic_d;
Hmm. Perhaps you should take this up with the w3 and get these put into the next XHTML standard. :)
As a result, we should be able to use the customary input methods or cut-n-paste to put any characters into any of the wikis, which is certainly a lot easier than looking up entities or running text through a UTF-8-to-entities convertor (which is what I currently do).
Hmmm. Wouldn't that need some modifications to browsers ?
Only if you've got a really limited browser. (Perhaps Netscape 4, the bane of web developers worldwide, or a text-mode browser in a non UTF-8 locale.)
Mozilla/Netscape 6, Internet Explorer 5+, Konqueror (if fonts are set up right), you should have no problem. Configuring keyboards/input methods, of course, is a system-dependent matter. (Japanese input is notoriously difficult to set up on Unixish systems that aren't running a primarily Japanese locale; it's quite easy on relatively current Mac or Windows systems, though.)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)