On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 03:34:18AM +0100, youandme(a)poczta.fm wrote:
On 10 Jan 2003 at 0:03, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
If we wanted "every ancient broken
browser", then
we shouldn't use PNG, CSS, JavaScript, OGG, colors,
and all things like that in articles, because there's
always some ancient broken browser that doesn't support
that. In fact all these are more likely to cause problems
than UTF-8.
So the problem might be finding out what the standard
for the browser in some parts of the world is and... write
for the browser slightly below the standard.
The policy "share your knowledge with the Wikipedia
with all the high technology that we have" is what makes
me thinking what this all Wikipedias are for...?
UTF-8 certainly qualifies.
On Polish
Wikipedia the policy is - if word is in Latin-based script,
it should be spelled in Latin characters with all diactrics, and if
it's not, original spelling (be it Cyrillic, Kanji or whatever else)
should be given in article.
Mind you thou Tomasz, that there's no consensus
on Polish Wikipedia on exeception: how to deal with words
in Latin-based scripts which have popular or established Polish way
of writing them without diactrics. So your sentence
gave only first approximation of the policy and was lacking sth.
The working copy of the policy and the ratio can be found,
unfortunately in Polish language only at:
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Zasady_pisowni_nazw_obcoj%C4%99zyczn…
Nobody ever suggested stripping diactrics other than from
"traditionally polonized" names. I even remember accents
on all these French names when we had old software.
If "screw
the spelling" is not, as is widely thought now,
just a temporary technical problem, but an oficial policy,
then sooner or later you will see a fork of English Wikipedia.
Let's hope that ancient browsers extinct sooner.
Unless somebody can show stats that say there is more than 1% of them,
we can think of them as already extinct.
It's
completely opposite. "Problems" of UTF-8, coming
from broken and ancient browsers, are completely irrelevant compared
to benefits of being able to write thing correctly.
For people with direct access to the Internet, living in the
so called Western World it is a "big" benefit.
For people living in other parts of the world without all the
"very" high technology, using some kind of "lower" high technology
and using future off-line version of Wikipedia it might not be
What do you mean ?
Standard browsers on both Linux and Windows support UTF-8.
How does UTF-8 or not changes that ?
Much bigger problem for them is lack of CD Wikipedia distributions.
Both of us are happy because we've got the
knowledge
how to make our computers and our browsers deal with UTF-8.
I haven't configured anything. It can deal with it out of the box.
Other people who just to want to read free
encyclopedia,
might not be as happy as we are - just watching some
broken texts.
Some people in this world prefer basic knowledge over nice look.
It's not about look, but correctness. They are losing lot of knowledge
now - after reading description of "Wroclaw" on English Wikipedia
they won't be able to find it on map or in search engine.
They are losing linguistic knowledge, because you can't write that
without UTF-8.
Anyway, how will UTF-8 or not affect them ?
By the way: what about accessability issue and all
the unexpected non-latin characters and strange diactrics?
Accessibility isn't handled at all now. In future it should be,
but it will require lot of design changes, about as many as CJK.
If that's what you mean, speech synthetisers won't be able to
pronounce right without right diactrics, so we aren't doing them any good.
CJK and accessibility even have something in common - we should have
optional furigana support on Japanese Wiki and optional speech synthesis
on every Wiki for blind users. Both will require strong default
synthetizers, option of giving additional information (for example that
given word is in other language), and overriding things.