RE: standard key mappings

>and sometimes things just get entrenched and the majority refuse to change
>even when there is no reason not to and every reason to make the
>change.  I personally would never consider using the obsolete QWERTY
>keyboard but the vast majority of the population of the world continue to
>plug along with that anachrism that was designed over 150 years ago with
>the intentional purpose of slowing down a typist.......sometimes even when
>there is a "convention" even if it is not formally a standard many folks
>will refuse to make the change.  A prime example is the question, Why does
>the United States not make the logical and easy change to the
>international standard of the Metric system???????

Someone posted a note not long ago (on xml-dev I think) showing how some of
the design decisions were based on standards that went directly (to the
inch!) back to the Romans and horse-drawn carriages. Odd business,
standards.

>> >In my experience these things are application-specific. Some of the more
>> >widespread applications have widespread standards - MacOS introduced
>> >command-C, command-X and command-V many years ago, and some variation of
>> >this
>> >is now pretty common on non-unix systems (which tend to use
>shift-delete,
>> >shift-insert or control-c, control-w, control-y). Beyond that, it seems
>> >pretty hard to get unification.
>
>and this is before one begins to try to figure out the motives of M$ and
>why they intentionally fly in the face of convention when they continually
>change the standards, sometimes standards they themselves recently set

All the more reason to try and work towards standards, so people don't get
misled by companies with questionable business and technological practices.

Cheers,
Danny.

Received on Monday, 29 July 2002 11:40:57 UTC