The curious case of disappearing Polish S
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Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#2I would theorize that second used slavic language is not Ukrainian but Serbo-Croatian, at risk of getting hated by everybody mentioned.
It also has a rare property of coming with two alphabets - cyrillic and latin.
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#3> To find room for the extra letters, typewriters needed to dispense with some punctuation, most notably semicolons (comma + backspace + colon), and parentheses (replaced in common use by slashes).
I've seen the slashes-as-parentheses on many (mostly older) documents before, but never knew why. Suddenly this makes so much sense. Unfortunately what makes less sense is official translators still using // for () these days.
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#4I initially planned to put a TL;DR here, but it's the best bug analysis I've seen in months - a pleasure to read! - so I'm leaving it for others to savour.
The very same bug used to be present in early Windows mobile GPU drivers - with global hotkeys making it impossible to enter Ł (with Intel GMA 950) and Ć (with ATI Catalyst). Being a Polish geek, I used to earn lots of free dinners from frustrated friends who were forced to copy-paste those letters on their brand new laptops. Funny how the same bug recurs in different types of software due to an obscure locale-dependent edge case - and it's much less known than, for example, the Turkish dotted/dotless I.
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#5I would theorize that second used slavic language is not Ukrainian but Serbo-Croatian, at risk of getting hated by everybody mentioned. It also has a rare property of coming with two alphabets - cyrillic and latin.
Poland has more than double the number of people than Serbia + Croatia + Bosnia + Montenegro.
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#6I would theorize that second used slavic language is not Ukrainian but Serbo-Croatian, at risk of getting hated by everybody mentioned. It also has a rare property of coming with two alphabets - cyrillic and latin.
FWIW Wikipedia lists Polish at 40M, Ukrainian at 30M, and Serbo-Croatian at 19M, for native speakers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#7I think the article is too verbose when knowing the context the bug is trivial: you intercepted meta+s and ctrl+s and in the way you broke alt+s.
I find the save dialog useless for web browsers as well, but I think preventing its use is a bad idea in general. Overriding the browser's shortcut is uncomfortable. For example, wordpress likes to capture cmd+ to change the font style, but that's how I usually change the active tab. It also disables ctrl+tab, the other way I use to escape while the text area is active.
People use their browsers and have their workflow in them. Breaking them needs to have a really good excuse. http://xkcd.com/1172/
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#8I think the article is too verbose when knowing the context the bug is trivial: you intercepted meta+s and ctrl+s and in the way you broke alt+s. I find the save dialog useless for web browsers as well, but I think preventing its use is a bad idea in general. Overriding the browser's shortcut is uncomfortable. For example, wordpress likes to capture cmd+ to change the font style, but that's how I usually change the a…
But the article explains why they override ctrl-s. It is because the users had muscle memory to keep hitting ctrl-s to save, since they were used to not having an auto-save function built in. But more than that, is the idea of a web browser as an app delivery platform. If a web browser is running an app (such as a word processor, or spreadsheet, or anything but browsing the web) it is sometimes necessary and beneficial to turn over browser-reserved keystrokes to the app in question. The only time to expect browser shortcut keys to work normally is when browsing a web page (vs. using the browser to run an application).
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#9What an interesting article. I don't think many people outside of our field realize how obscure some bugs can be, and the lengths needed to diagnose them. Not every bug, of course; not even 95% of bugs. But every now and again, you get something that really tries your problem solving skills... and inevitably it ends up being something small like not checking the state of every meta key.
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#10Yet another example of why websites shouldn't be able to hijack keys that have meaning outside them (in the browser itself, or in the desktop environment). It still blows my mind that browsers permit this and don't provide an easy option to stop such abusive (and dangerous!) behaviour.
The workaround is typical of web stuff as well: deal with the symptoms one by one while leaving the underlying problem unquestioned.