seer26 wrote on 2002-11-09 20:04 UTC: > (What I wouldnt mind are things like a real right arrow character to > substiture for "->", or the ability to use Kanji in my identifiers.)
The requirement of ISO 14755 that all control keys with symbols on them (for example the cursor, shift and tab keys) should be usable not only to enter the control function but also the corresponding graphical symbol is definitely a very good idea. A next generation English keyboard standard would definitely have to allow the entry of arrows in all four or eight directions in a way that involves the cursor keys. > Anyways, the only thing I would change about the US English keyboard > would be to rearrange the keys into dvorak layout, drop scroll lock, > move escape closer to my fingers, and get rid of all the windows keys. The Dvorak layout is certainly a far more sensible one than the qwerty layout. But don't underestimate the switching cost involved. One of my research students has built himself last month a Dvorak keyboard and is currently monitoring his progress of getting used to it. Believe me, it is a very uncomfortable conversion process, the more painful the more experienced you are with using querty. Starting on a Dvorak keyboard after years of experience on qwerty initially makes you a much worse typist than if you hadn't had any typing experience at all. You will observe for many weeks that your fingers first accellerate for each letter into the qwerty position, then stop, and only after that the process of searching for the dvorak position starts. You not only have to learn Dvorak, you also have to fight your qwerty experience at the same time. Based on that experience, it is hard for me to see how that could survive for mass-market personal computers, especially as for a significant time people will run into both keyboards. For that reason, I think the revision of the punctuation, symbol and function key positions and the revision of the alphabetic keys (Dvorak, etc.) should remain separate projects for the time being. What might be slightly easier to fix than the overall alphabetic layout 9is the interleaving of key positions. The currently used interleaved arrangement of vertical key rows in the standards is still dictated by the needs of mechanical typewriters to position vertical mechanical levers below the keys. As a result, we end of with the odd situation that hand movements become asymetric, even though the hands are shaped symetrically. Just stacking the keys vertically would already be a significant improvement. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
