On Fri, Mar 30, 2007 at 11:56:56AM +0200, Egmont Koblinger wrote: > On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 04:46:14PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote: > > > I am a mathematician > > I nearly became a mathematican, too. Just a few weeks before I had to choose > university I changed my mind and went to study informatics. > > When I was younger, I had a philosophy closer to yours. Programming in
I’m not sure if this is a cheap ad hominem ;) or just an honest storytelling.. > (more or less). Users don't care about implementation details, and actually > they shouldn't need to care. They just care whether things work. They're not Users should be presented with something that’s possible for ordinary people to understand and which has reasonable explanations. Otherwise the computer is a disempowering black box that requires them to look to “experts” whenever something doesn’t make sense. Here’s an interesting article that’s somehow related (though I don’t necessarily claim it supports either of our view and don’t care to argue over whether it does): http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6282 > There's absolutely no way to explain any user that his browser isn't able to > display some letters unless he quits it and sets a different locale, but 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. The only option you’re left with is the Microsoft one: telling users that clean applications which respect the standards are somehow “backwards”, while hiding from them the fact that the standards provide a much saner path to internationalization than hard-coding all sorts of unicode stuff into each application. 2. You don’t have to explain anything. This is 2007 and the user’s locale uses UTF-8. Period. Unless this is some oldschooler who already knows the reasons and insists on using a legacy encoding anyway. Rich -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
