I do not have sufficient profanity in my verbal arsenal for websites that override basic, fundamental browser behaviour because they think they know better than I do what I actually meant to do. I have noticed Medium being a regular perpetrator of this sort of broken behaviour before. That one of the developers at Medium could run into such a glowing example of one of the many reasons it's nasty to override browser b…
The curious case of disappearing Polish S
31–40 of 118 posts
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#32Did we? I dare to say that your historical account is inaccurate. We stuck to our traditional layout for a while. What does it matter if the keyboard wasn't customized in physical sense anyway? You should be looking at the screen, not at the keys. If I recall well, Polish typewriter layout (PN-87) was still available on Windows 95/98. The now prevalent >Alt + somethingDomestic software certainly used the typewriter layout - for instance http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAG_%28edytor_tekstu%29, once a very popular word processor for PC, last version released in 1996.
The typewriter layout finally got extinct, but what spelled its ultimate demise was the internet, I believe.
Early netiquette actually forbid using Polish diacritics, because of encoding issues - in that era you could never be sure whether the other person would read "gwóźdź" or "gw░¶d¶", so it was considered good practice to stick to Latin characters only.
Meaning that users didn't get to feel the pain of having to press Alt + whatever all the time, and so they got hooked on default QWERTY.
As the last of Mohicans, I use the typewriter layout to this very day (for typing in Polish; I alternate), only I had to recreate it myself (using Microsoft Keyboard Layout Editor)*
It allows for much faster typing in compare to these inconvenient right-Alt shortcuts. Swapping Y with Z by itself is a win for a Polish speaker (writer), given that Z is much more common in Polish. While its frequency is at mere 0.07% in English, it reaches 4.9% in Polish, placing it in the top 10. Thus putting it under the weakest finger of all - your left pinky - isn't very considerate.
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* Funnily enough - I'm not flame baiting - when I decided to try Linux, hailed for its customizability, I found out that recreating my favorite layout wasn't as easy. I got lots of advice on various forums, but noone had a simple receipt for me. Admittedly this was few years back.
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#33"While France, Germany, and other countries got their early PC with customized keyboards whose layouts mirrored closely the typewriters that came before… [...] …in Poland, we had to find another way of inputting the extra 9 diacritics unique to our language." Did we? I dare to say that your historical account is inaccurate. We stuck to our traditional layout for a while. What does it matter if the keyboard wasn't cus…
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you have all my votes. Words cannot describe the ire which consumes me when cute webdevs reinvent everything because it works on their industrial-grade computers with perfect internet. I agree. So. Much. But. It pains me to say this: what else would you want to have happen when a user presses Ctrl+S? Are they really wrong, here? Wouldn't a user expect a "save blog" on Ctrl+S? How would I explain to a non-tech us…
Users who do "Ctrl-S" to do fast save are certainly a minority. (1) That minority can have somewhere in the configuration of the site the setting where they can turn the default off, but the default should really be for $deity sake, don't override the default behaviour! 1) I'm old enough that I've programmed the computers with the front panel switches bit by bit, but I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when w…
It becomes a mental tic, an "I've finished the paragraph" instinct. And I'm very glad medium handles it.
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#35"While France, Germany, and other countries got their early PC with customized keyboards whose layouts mirrored closely the typewriters that came before… [...] …in Poland, we had to find another way of inputting the extra 9 diacritics unique to our language." Did we? I dare to say that your historical account is inaccurate. We stuck to our traditional layout for a while. What does it matter if the keyboard wasn't cus…
I just checked, and it appears PN-87 is included in the default Ubuntu install as "Polish (qwertz)". For whatever reason many distributions include far fewer keyboard layouts than Ubuntu.
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Poland has more than double the number of people than Serbia + Croatia + Bosnia + Montenegro.
You're certainly right, third then.
And on top of that you must use the same criterion for the S-C language, not counting Slovenians, Albanians, Macedonians, etc who know the language but don't use it much anymore.
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Users who do "Ctrl-S" to do fast save are certainly a minority. (1) That minority can have somewhere in the configuration of the site the setting where they can turn the default off, but the default should really be for $deity sake, don't override the default behaviour! 1) I'm old enough that I've programmed the computers with the front panel switches bit by bit, but I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when w…
I've lost too much data to trust to autosave. When coding I don't want autosave, because I don't want my computer to be trying to compile all the time (I write Scala, I don't have the RAM to do that) - I want it to wait for an explicit Ctrl-S to tell it that I've finished a meaningful section and it should compile now. I have exactly the same thing on prose.io (which I write on a lot, and which looks very similar to…
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#38I 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…
Not just the early ones, no :)
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you have all my votes. Words cannot describe the ire which consumes me when cute webdevs reinvent everything because it works on their industrial-grade computers with perfect internet. I agree. So. Much. But. It pains me to say this: what else would you want to have happen when a user presses Ctrl+S? Are they really wrong, here? Wouldn't a user expect a "save blog" on Ctrl+S? How would I explain to a non-tech us…
Users who do "Ctrl-S" to do fast save are certainly a minority. (1) That minority can have somewhere in the configuration of the site the setting where they can turn the default off, but the default should really be for $deity sake, don't override the default behaviour! 1) I'm old enough that I've programmed the computers with the front panel switches bit by bit, but I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when w…
I, for one, used to have this habit. The notion of "not knowing anyone who uses Ctrl + S" is a bit funny - are you really aware whether people around you do this or not? How does it come up?
Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Users who do "Ctrl-S" to do fast save are certainly a minority. (1) That minority can have somewhere in the configuration of the site the setting where they can turn the default off, but the default should really be for $deity sake, don't override the default behaviour! 1) I'm old enough that I've programmed the computers with the front panel switches bit by bit, but I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when w…
> I've never used "Ctrl-S" as the "fast save" when writing documents. I don't know actually anybody who does I, for one, used to have this habit. The notion of "not knowing anyone who uses Ctrl + S" is a bit funny - are you really aware whether people around you do this or not? How does it come up?