On ven, 2003-01-10 at 11:45, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 11:22:43AM -0800, Brion Vibber
wrote:
My position continues to be that we should not
switch the big Latin-1
wikis to UTF-8 until we have automatic conversion to handle common
broken browsers.
All common browsers support UTF-8, so what do you mean by
"common broken browsers" ?
Oh, how I wish that were true. *Current* versions of the most common
browsers support UTF-8, but older versions which are still used by
actual, real, Wikipedia contributors whose complaints reach my ears and
whose broken edits reach my eyes, are in fact broken.
"Common broken browsers" are the ones commonly turning up as broken. See
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta.wikipedia.org_technical_issues
This hits real people, including heavy contributors like Anthere; as for
myself, I can't edit UTF-8 pages on the Macs in my university's computer
lab without breaking the content, because they have only an old IE 5.0
and Netscape 4.x.
Autodetection won't work (all popular browsers,
and most of less
popular ones, support UTF-8, and we don't want to break any of them,
list of broken browsers doesn't exist).
Checking the 'Accept-charset' header plus a blacklist of known bad
user-agents should do well enough.
There should be a link
"my browser is completely broken" which would set a cookie and
software, seeing that cookie, would convert page to "safer" version.
Better to do the safer thing by default when we know we're going to need
it.
But what would that "safer" version be ?
* ISO-8859-1 + &codes;
Ugly, but workable in most cases. (Or another base charset could be used
for some languages.) Automatic conversion of input &codes; to UTF-8
storage internally would additionally help with searching.
* ISO-8859-1 + `?' marks
* ISO-8859-1 + rendered PNGs (do these browsers support PNG ?)
That would be useless for editing, which is the problem. A browser that
won't _display_ UTF-8 text (whether able to show all the glyphs or not)
is damn near impossible to find. (Some shitty text browsers may manage
it.)
I don't think we should support editing that way.
What would you prefer? That we tell Anthere to take a hike and buy a new
computer? That I petition my uni to upgrade hundreds of machines in
their labs? That we ignore similar conditions across the world where
people have old machines or machines they cannot control and tell them,
hey, fuck off, Wikipedia's not for you you whiny bitch?
*I don't think so.*
We should make at least a good-faith effort to make our site usable. I
don't mind so much of joe's buggy browser overlaps something in the
header from time to time or has an ugly border look, but if it's
damaging the content of our site because of bad interactions with
editing, than that hurts the very core of what a wiki is about.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)