- From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 23:47:55 +0200
On Jan 18, 2005, at 09:41, Hallvord Reiar Michaelsen Steen wrote: > Unlike us, Japanese users know what they are doing when using an IME > :) Yes, but asking questions (perhaps na?ve) from the outside may sometimes be helpful and may actually uncover something that is not thought about because the close stakeholders are taking things for granted. I think it is appropriate to ask for use cases just like use cases are called for with other proposals. It may look politically incorrect, but I don't think "i18n issues" should be exempt of the scrutiny other proposals are subjected to. An example of lack of critical thinking in i18n: ISO-8859-15 was created to address issues related to Finnish and French. I am a native Finnish speaker, but I still think ISO-8859-15 was a bad partial solution to the supposed problem and actually made the problem worse. Because of i18n hypersensitivities, many Linux distros took ISO-8859-15 seriously and actually shipped with an ISO-8859-15 default for Finnish instead of doing the right thing (UTF-8 for every locale) right away. And yes, I have been on the other side as well. I think the lack of an "en-dash" list-style-type in CSS forces foreign bulleted list typography on Finns. Still, I was unable to convince the editor of the relevant spec that such a list-style-type should be added. To get back to this case, fantasai already pointed to a generalization that isn't limited to the Japanese-specific point of view. > It is actually very annoying to, say, submit double-width characters > to a server that expects ASCII. Point taken. However, I do consider such a server non-robust. I also consider a server that can't deal with decomposed umlauts non-robust, although I recognize the need to cater for such inevitable lack of robustness by normalizing in the browser. -- Henri Sivonen hsivonen at iki.fi http://iki.fi/hsivonen/
Received on Tuesday, 18 January 2005 13:47:55 UTC