[Wikipedia-l] Switching everything to UTF-8 (Peter)

[Anthere]

From: Peter Gervai <grin at tolna.net>
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Switching everything to 

Hi Peter, that was a long and interesting message.

I thought of perhaps adding a couple of words to
complete what you wrote.

>What was the memory footprint of opera 4,5 or
whatever 
>you use? What browser do you use regularly, under
what 
>operating system? How much memory do you have?

>I just checked: opera 7.21 uses 35MB virtual (20MB 
>resident) memory, I believe this is not outrageous
>for a graphical browser. (Latest opera is 6.03 for
>Mac as far as I see, but I won't downgrade mine.)


I will first reassure you, I finally found a solution
with Netscape 7.02. Not perfect (slow in particular,
and sometimes unexpectedly crash, but that was my best
option). My mac is a 128 mo, and I use a bit of
virtual memory. System 9.04. I can't check memory
requirement of Opera 6. It was so desastrous I put it
in the trashcan. Netscape 7 is currently at 53 Mo.
Opera 5 is at 25 Mo. The system is at 34 Mo. IRC at
nearly 1 Mo. And Photoshop is at 47 Mo...hum...I would
have said Photoshop would require more than Netscape.
Curious. But no images are open. I get in trouble when
on top I open QuarkXPress and Canvas :-)

>> The upgrade is perfectly ok if you have a recent
>> computer. But you cannot expect every user to have
so.
>> There was a big campaign about 4 years ago in
France,
>> and many many people bought some imacs. 

>That's a problem. I can't tell you about Mac
browsers,
>apart from the fact that I see "Mac OS/X" (whatever
it
>might be) in Mozilla download pages. Don't Mac have 
>any more recent browsers than Opera 6.03 or Netscape
>4.xx? (I see netscape 6.2.xx for MacPPC.)

OS 9 is the previous system. X is the new one.
Requires quite a bit of memory. Running system X on my
computer would be problematic. Many machines are still
in OS 9. Opera 6 is the most recent one. Netscape 7 as
well. And there are plenty of good browsers, but they
work only on X. The jump between 9 and X was
...well... it is really different.

>I'm sure you going to have troubles with that "fine 
>for internet" soon. dmoz.org is going to be changed
>to utf-8 "real soon now" (see
>http://dmoz.org/Test/World/
>utf8 categories, like Catalan or Arabian), and most
>international project are either already utf-8
>or going to be soon.

As I said, I solved the problem. What I fear is that
most people I know who bought macintosh around 3 to 4
years, are usually quite "unable" with computers, and
have no idea how to upgrade a browser or a system.
They really do not. It is no joke. These people use
the computer they brought from the shop, and they do
not change anything on it, unless they have a nephew
able to fix the stuff for them. They will keep the
computer as is, till the they change it because the
dvd reader is dead because kids put chewing gum in it.

These people are also our public. Better even, as far
as I am concerned, they are the people I try to reach
to be editors.

Also, some people only have access to computers in
public libraries (there are two in my city...computers
in the main library I mean...not much he ?), or in
school (there are more in my kids school than in the
library).

Most of these computers are *not* changed very often
(understatement). Even in universities. Students do
not pay very expensive fees for their studies, the
drawback is that material is not great, not replaced
often.

Though I am quite a joke in computer stuff, I was the
one who explain my daughter teacher how to use her
computer last year; she have some pedagogic games for
the kids on it. Good stuff. The least I can say, the
computer was not brand new...but it was connected to
internet. Just seeing how she approached the "thing",
I can tell you she won't upgrade the stuff. Which does
not mean she will not show the kids great stuff.

But I think she, and the kids, are also our public,
and perhaps our editors.

>Can your browser edit utf-8 articles which does NOT
>contain non-latin1 characters?

>> I know it is not possible for these users to use
>Opera
>> 6, and not possible to switch to system X.

>I believe you, but then, they are in a dead end, and
>they can expect more and more problems as unicode
>gets used more widely. usemod wikis just being
changed
>to utf-8, we'll see what happens.

They are not in a dead end, they are just "old"
computers. Newer ones do not have problems.

>Come:
http://narya.grin.hu/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?UniCodeTest

>Edit, enter your browser and opsys, and see what
>happens.

I did. Of course, this will work well, since my
browser is now working.

Peter, *my* problem is solved now, or I promise I
would be screaming with the idea of switching the
french wikipedia utf 8 *now*.

All what I say is that there are still people with
these, and I really do not feel like telling them, "go
away". That is all I mean.

>> I do not understand that comment.

>If the iso8859-1 encoded page contains illegal
>characters,
>it breaks if you edit it with a standards compliant
>browser.

I did a good old edit with my favorite browser on your
test page as well :-))))

>> > Can you figure manually correcting each time
after >a
>> user ?

>Well, I'd revert it and tell the user to use a
>different 
>browser. :-/

I understand. This is not a good option to my opinion,
but I am sure Brion and co will find a good solution
that will be acceptable to all of us :-)

>> and perhaps those editing
>> wikipedia right now are people technically better
>> equipped that the average human being connected to
>> internet,

>Definitely, if you count in the Albanian orphans and
>the chinese peasants.

Hum...about 6 months ago, I was at the technical level
of an albanian orphan then :-)

I could perhaps launch a subscription for a new
computer ?

>Otherwise no. I can run opera well on a pentium 233
>with
>32 MB of memory (and on 16MB either, but it's much
>slower).
>How much is a P233 nowadays? $10? (convert to FFR at
>will :))

Peter...we are in euros...

Peter...I have no idea what a P233 is. I suppose
memory. But in truth, Peter, some people just *do not
know anything* about all this.

>Most end-users are using windoze, and it is well
>equipped
>with utf-8 conform browsers.

I would regret it if we gave another motive for
windows to win over other systems :-)

>I stay silent, and let the old timers decide. If I
can
>be any technical help, I'll start talking again.

I do as well, because I can't help at all :-(

>Hoping the best,
>Peter

Thanks Peter :-)

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