On Sun, Jul 14, 2019 at 11:11 PM Jim Jagielski <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On 2019/07/14 06:11:46, Ted Dunning <[email protected]> wrote: > > Nicolas, > > > > > A great example of this is ASCII. The developers (English > > speakers in the US in the late 50's and early 60's) saw no real problem > > with omitting ü, å, ø and ñ. > > Certainly some of that was likely the limitation of the technology itself, > what with 8 bit chars. It was including the lowest common denominator that > fit within a technology derived limit. Also, I you design something just > for English speaking people, for example, and what you create becomes so > popular that others wish to use it, I’m not sure if you can assign 20/20 > hindsight. > 8 bits is plenty for something like ISO-8859-1 to support a large swathe of these characters. There was a small advantage in terms of character lookup size. Of course, devices didn't actually need to display all the characters. There was a small advantage in terms of the ability to use the high order bit for control purposes. But that was minuscule. On the other hand, I lived through the conversion and it was very painful. I was working on machine translation, information retrieval and language coding problems. We still have problems with all kinds of character sets because the first solutions were so broken. So yes, designing for just English speakers is a great example of having limited goals because you have smaller diversity in your goal setters. And it is a great example of how things would have been easier if we had started with a broader awareness of what people needed.
