On 08/06/06, Tim Starling <t.starling(a)physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Hoi,
> This small Unicode issue is a show stopper. When software is suggested
> that only works on Latin script, you do not appreciate the amount of
> work that is done in other scripts using the MediaWiki software.
"You do not appreciate" - rather a confrontational tone, there. Who
are we to assume that someone else doesn't appreciate the amount of
effort put in elsewhere? It might be correct, but then again, there
might be no specific bias against it.
> Apart from that why would it be boring.. this is
a technical list.
> Personally I am interested in two things as well, what other projects
> are you referring to and how you want to see this attribution done.
Apart from why what would be boring? The post was to get feedback,
don't withhold it. I would imagine standard attribution for the code
under GNU GPL blah blah blah. We won't be adding flashing banners,
"Wikipedia now uses a feature from XYZ". Or are we to start crediting
developers with individual features? "Thanks for clearing your
watchlist, c/o Rob Church."
I discussed unicode support with the original poster
on IRC. I couldn't get
through to him that adding UTF-8 support to a PHP application is trivial,
My impression of the poster was that he didn't completely understand
the whole UTF-8/Unicode/blah thing nor its implications, and looked
somewhat confused.
and requires no special UTF-8 support within PHP
itself. MediaWiki's UTF-8
support is mostly implemented from scratch using PHP's binary-safe string
handling. My wikidiff2 module in C++ also contains a simple UTF-8 decoder
within the word splitting routine. It's not difficult.
If the *idea* is found to be viable, adding the UTF-8 goodies will be
trivial, and we'll put the damn effort in.
Rob Church