At 2002-08-23 07:43 +0200, Kurt Jansson wrote:
As for a special notation for accented characters, I'm not fond of the idea. Foreign users should have foreign keyboards.
Of course that's not the problem.
Others should still be able to enter accents by whatever means their OS and browser allow, and I'm not aware of any that don't have some feature for it.
I don't know which feature you mean. Some foreign contributors use html entities for umlauts, others type ae for ä, oe for ö and ue fur ü. The first one makes the EditBox look ugly, and Links with entities in them don't work, and the second one has to be corrected by someone. At the moment it's not a big deal, just annoying. But I think it could be easily automated, if entities would automaticaly be turned into umlauts when the text is saved. An easier way of entering umlauts, like "o, would make foreign contributors even happier, but that should be standardized then in all wikipedias that use umlauts, accents, etc.
As far as I can oversee the problem the best way to use accent letters in this (HTML rendering) environment is to use 'ä' etc. since every visitor can make sure his browser can render it correctly. NN and IE can already do it since version 4 or even earlier.
Every other method will depend on whatever font the editor of an article is using and that may not be the same as what the next editor is using or what the Wikipedia web-server is saying to the visitor it is serving.
Perhaps the Wikipedia software could try to translate ae and such to the appropriate HTML abreviations like ä but that would be risky, because it would have to know in what language each word was written. In Dutch we have the 'oe' as a valid combination which is not equal to 'ö', so if Dutch and German were mixed in an article it would cause problems.
Please also consider that font problems may seem to be solved for now, but how local is that solution? And how new and MS-based does the system have to be and how long will it last? Perhaps someone invents a much better system in ten years time. Will all texts become worthless then? At least with the 'ä'-system it's all in ASCII and therefore human-readible and even understandable with a little effort.
Also consider that a lot of PDA's don't use or only offer a few standard fonts.
Could someone please configure this mailinglist the same way as wikipedia-l, so that replies go to the list?
I agree. (Add the 'Reply-To:' header, don't change the 'From:' header.)
Greetings, Jaap