On Tuesday 18 November 2003 11:03, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Brion wrote:
Another possibility is simply to
'blacklist' known problem
browsers by printing a notice/link to better browsers on
the edit page warning that they may have problems, as
we now have a warning on long pages that some browsers
may have problems. (Though in that case we aren't checking
specific browsers.)
Those types of messages are not at all welcoming. I get pretty pissed when
I go to a website that informs me that I need to upgrade or change my
browser. And I /really/ get annoyed when those websites make suggestions on
which browser I should use. I already have a browser that I am very
comfortable with thank-you-very-much. And yes I upgrade often. But many
people don't because they either don't know how, have a dial-up account
that can't handle more than a couple meg download or they have an outdated
OS or computer equipment.
We shouldn't be telling those people that they have to upgrade to use
Wikipedia if they can use Wikipedia just fine without UTF-8. The benefits
simply do not seem to be at all compelling enough to justify the negatives
(at least for en.wikipedia). But if you can figure out a way to have UTF-8
without the associated problems, then great.
The benefits of having non-ISO-8859-1 texts editable for everyone do not
outweight the negatives of not having them editable for 2% of users?
Further, there are browsers that have problems when UTF-8 is NOT used.
Konqueror, which I am using, for one: on ISO-8859-1 pages, all non-ISO-8859-1
characters typed in turn into question marks, so they have to be typed in as
entities, and most interwiki links also don't work; and Brion's survey show
that there are 3.5 times as much konqueror users as of all non-UTF-8 browsers
combined.