Re: [Moderator Action] Question about password fied.

Junya,

The question is, what does it mean to have a multibyte character in a field
which is not displayed?
For example, if I wanted to type the Japanese word "nihongo" in Japanese
characters, I would switch my input method editor to kanji-mode, type
n-i-h-o-n-g-o, then select and confirm the rendering of the kanji.  But all my
password fields use substitute characters, usually asterisk *, for each input
byte.  So the question becomes, what is a multibyte character in a non-rendering
situation?  I suppose you can interpret the password bytes as multibyte
characters, but does it make a difference?

For the user, they type the keys which make sense to them.  For the system, it
matches literal byte values to those in a password file.  If you allow the user
to type multibyte characters, it would mean that they would use the IME in
kanji-mode, maybe view the selections, make a selection, but then would have to
confirm based on a display string which would look something like "*******",
possibly with an asterisk for each byte, not each character.

However, I may have missed something.  Maybe it is more intuitive for a Japanese
to use the IME and see the selection, even if they don't see the final result.

Regards,
Andrea
-- 
Andrea Vine, avine@eng.sun.com, iPlanet i18n architect
...even if it requires not really a dance with the Devil, but 
call it a brief shimmy with his accountant's daughter.
-- Sean Burke http://www.netadventure.net/~sburke/

"Junya Ishihara (by way of Martin J. Duerst )" wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am I18N engineer testing a product readiness for multi byte
> language.
> My question is that "Should password field allow the multi byte
> to be input or restrict?".
> 
> We Japanese usually use only single byte character(alphabet or number)
> as password.
> Our product currently allow multi byte to be input in some password
> field.
> Will it be a cause of some problems?
> 
> Regarding use of only single byte character as password, how about in other
> Asian countries?
> 
> Junya Ishihara

Received on Wednesday, 29 March 2000 15:02:57 UTC