- From: Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>
- Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2011 22:54:46 +0200
- To: "Phillips, Addison" <addison@lab126.com>
- Cc: "www-tag@w3.org" <www-tag@w3.org>, "public-i18n-core@w3.org" <public-i18n-core@w3.org>
* Phillips, Addison wrote: >I agree that user stories are important, although the languages most >affected are also the ones that it is hardest for us to gather evidence >from. It is also true that people have "gotten around" things not >working by using ASCII-only identifiers, for example. The advent of more >active or actively-generated content and better Unicode support, though, >expose us to more problems in this area. More Unicode means some old problems go away and some new problems come up, I am not sure whether that makes for "more" problems in total. Here for instance we have some legacy character encodings that interfere with normalization, but they also being phased out, and with them likely the normalization problems aswell. Anyway, I care less about the stories and more about the users. Look at it this way: if we don't have users who can actually judge whether some proposal would make matters better for them, how would we know if the proposal actually makes matters better for anyone? For all we'd know it may make matters worse because the affected users have found a better solution that they didn't tell us about, and our solution breaks theirs. As for workarounds, well, I've been using E-Mail since the late 1990s and even today I can't put my name in the From header because people are still using software that would mangle my name. On the web this has not improved much either, I still get snail mail with my name mangled, and just this month I signed up for a web forum only to find out they, for whatever reason, "asciify" my name in various places, but "ö" is turned into "o" everywhere, and the only way to get my name properly asciified is, just as I do in E-Mail, by using "oe" myself. And there is the input problem, if I use "ö" in place of "oe", some people can't actually type in my name on their keyboard, and they too are unlikely to know the proper transliteration, so by not using the properly asciified spelling, I am making it hard to communicate with me. So at this point I am unsure we'll ever get to a point where I can com- fortably spell my name properly, even if just for that reason. Actually it's even worse, consider some write my name as "Bjoem" for instance. Point being, how would I know that whatever normalization problems the people in absentia are having, aren't much like the far simpler problem I am having (in my case the spelling differences are at least obvious)? What I would like to avoid is people raising Normalization issues on protocols without being able to convince whoever is working on them that there is a problem, that it needs fixing, and that there is a fix that is known to work. All this requires evidence which seems to be lacking at the moment, and I don't think the TAG can help there. Even as little as a list of the most affected people would help a lot to change this. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de 25899 Dagebüll · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/
Received on Thursday, 30 June 2011 20:55:12 UTC