At 2002-08-23 07:43 +0200, Kurt Jansson wrote:
[...] 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.
Well, in some sense it is easy, and in some sense it isn't. It would mean introducing for the first time a difference in functionality depending upon the language of the concerning Wikipedia because for example the translation of entities is not the desired behavior on the English Wikipedia at the moment.
In itself this is not hard to implement by defining certain functions that are called in the common code and defined in the language-specific part of the code, but 1. deciding which functions we define and what they should do requires some deep architectural thinking, and 2. it would add an extra layer of complexity that makes it a bit harder to for example determine what the cause of a certain bug is (it could be language specific).
So Lee is probably right if he wants a good justification for such an addition. If you say that at the moment it is not a big deal (I assume that only a very small minority of the contributors of the German Wikipedia is working on a non-German keyboard, and I only saw a few instances where people had used "ö") then it is probably best to wait until the moment it does become a big deal.
-- Jan Hidders