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