On Fri, Mar 30, 2007 at 11:04:09AM -0400, Rich Felker wrote: > I’m not sure if this is a cheap ad hominem ;) or just an honest > storytelling..
The latter, of course. Sorry if my intent wasn't clear. > 1. Sure there is. Simply telling the user he/she is working in an > environment that doesn’t support the character is clear and does make > sense. I’ve explained this sort of thing countless times doing user > help on IRC. > > It’s much more difficult to explain to the user why they can see these > characters in their web browser but can’t paste them into a text file, > because it’s INCONSISTENT and DOESN’T MAKE SENSE. Interesting point. Yes, we have to choose: either have a consistent system with absolutely no support for out-of-locale characters, or an inconsistent system with partial support for out-of-locale chars. Still, I'd choose the latter one. Why? First, because probably the supported subset is just sufficient for the users, e.g. they want to see the web page, but not copy-paste it. Then why not let them do it? Second, because I still can easily explain that "those characters are not _fully_ supported, only partially". I don't think it's harder to explain this than to explain if they were not supported at all. Third, users can easily discover that the locale is not a system-wide but rather a process-wide setting. At this point your reasoning most likely becomes invalid in their eyes. And actually, don't forget, web browsers don't work the way you wanted them to work, they work the way that I think is correct. It's not a matter of taste, it's a fact: all well-known graphical browsers display all glyphs, even if they run under a latin1 locale. You can't tell your users that it doesn't work, since they see at least one place where it works. > 2. You don’t have to explain anything. This is 2007 and the user’s > locale uses UTF-8. Period. Yes. Luckily it is the case nowadays. (At least for those who use good distributions.) -- Egmont -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
