Jim Allan wrote: > H.S. wrote: >> >> I recommend the rule of thumb: use alpha-numeric characters only (a-z, >> 0-9) and perhaps an underscore to separate words in the filename, and >> additionally a period for the extension. How hard can this be? > > Would you recommend this to a ordinary Joe who just happens to be > Chinese and mostly uses Chinese? > > Are not Chinese, and Gujarati, and even French and German normal languages?
Yes, but only if the unicode (utf8 or utf16 or others) text support has been polished and verified that it works in the OSes in their languages. Having said this, the reality is the operating systems have been predominantly ascii based. Their source code is predominantly ascii based (if you are a programmer, how many programs have you made which support unicode?). It is just not realistic to simply ignore that. Secondly, for a person who has *absolutely* no idea about any English characters and want to input strings to the operating system safely, I would suggest s/he not use any OS which is predominantly ASCII based. It would be better to use an OS created in his/her language. In my own view, unicode support is coming along quite well. But it is just not there yet so that I can recommend a Gujrati user to change his/her locale and simply forget all English s/he knows. Some European languages are much better supported, though. But if you translate the recommendation I made in my earlier post to a different language than English, it still hold! Please don't get me wrong, I know where you are coming from, but it is wishful thinking that ignoring the underlying realities of basic computer usage will not result in any problems. > I agree with you about avoiding spaces and being careful, and testing > anything you are doing that seems unusual, but one has little reason any > more to be careful about perfectly normal characters in one’s language, > if that language happens not to be English, and characters like “é” or > “ö” are even “þ” or “ŵ” or “ŋ” or “ħ” are used. Here is where I will repeat that a users should first get comfortable with the limitations of their computer instead of continuing to use it in blissful ignorance. Some of the special characters should be avoided, no matter what language is being used. For any minimally competent computer user, this should be almost trivial to find out. Example of blissful ignorance: it is not uncommon to find users (usually in the business field or in teaching field) to make "powerpoints" and then call tech support complaining they are having problem with it. The cause? Their including of tens of photo at their max resolution as taken with their digital camera. So you see, there are two basic problems here: the user has no idea about basics of digital pictures and cameras and none about using "powerpoint". And hey, lo and behold, it is the computer that fails to work! > > But in this case the application did warn the user. But the user did not > understand the warning. This applied to programmers also, when they > stumble across an error message. One of the last things even experienced > programmers often do is attempt to read and understand the error message. It is a good thing the application warned the user. However, I think it is unrealistic to foresee every conceivable user mistake. The user has to shoulder some responsibility, after all. Do you have any idea how may users just yank a USB stick from their computers without "removing them safely" and then blame the computer for fscking it up? In any case, I see what you mean by the application throwing a useful warning. I am just trying to point out that there are all kinds of users out there and they may not even understand what a particular warning is about if they are completely computer-illiterate. The underlying problem is making people understand that they need to get some basic education about computer usage. Regards. > Jim Allan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
