Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The curious case of disappearing Polish S

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 118 posts

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#51

Post by mahouse »

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #44
blahedo wrote: post #15

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…

I'm not sure if it's happening now, but at one point in time F5 wouldn't work to reload the page if twitter is loaded. And not to mention google plus, that swallows Ctrl+PgDown and Ctrl+PgUp, which happen to be shortcuts to move through tabs. So you are moving through tabs, then you suddenly stop, and you have to reach for the mouse.

Not only it would not reload the page, it would retweet the currently selected tweet. It was silly.

But what's really silly is that the browser actually allows a webpage to override such a basic shortcut like F5.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#52

Post by ojanik »

This is how you type euro sign € on a lot of keyboard layouts, no communism needed.

Looking at your code, you're also blocking Win+S on Windows and Ctrl+S on Mac for no good reason.

Extrapolating from your experience: What about shift key?

When you decide to block default behaviour, do your research, not everyone is on a Mac with American layout.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#53

Post by inyourtenement »

dredmorbius wrote: post #48
cezarywojcik wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While for the most part I agree with you, there are sometimes when it seems... appropriate. Take, for example, Google Docs. I'm used to hitting CTRL-S when working on just about any paper. If I had the save website dialog pop up every time I hit CTRL-S, I would start to get annoyed. I'm glad that Google Docs doesn't do that. A similar case can be made here.

A website should save your work as you go . No fucking excuse.

In both cases, Google Docs and Medium, the website does save your work as you go. What is being discussed is the HUMAN habit of pressing Ctrl-S.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#54

Post by odiroot »

Oh nice, an article about my native language on HN's front page.

Currently living in Germany I actually find our approach to special characters really elegant. I was surprised how much different are German (and French) keyboards.

I wonder whether these different layouts can affect for example your programming prowess.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#56

Post by igonvalue »

blahedo wrote: post #15

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…

I haven't used Medium, so I can't speak to it, but in my experience the most frustrating instance of this behavior is from Stack Overflow. Keybindings such as `Ctrl`+`k` and `Ctrl`+`b`, which are native to OS X, behave completely unexpectedly in Stack Overflow textareas, to the extent that I sometimes just give up and compose my text in an external editor.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#57

Post by V-2 »

acqq wrote: post #40
V-2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

By watching normal non-programmers people like my girlfriends and programmers people like my colleagues with whom I worked closely. Former just don't do any Ctrl-anything during the writing. The later simply never needed Ctrl-S, just like I. Autosave really works in the most common tool, Word. When my girlfriend lost her work, it was never for the autosave, but for manually saving over something she did before or Wor…

By watching normal non-programmers people like my girlfriends and programmers people like my colleagues with whom I worked closely. Former just don't do any Ctrl-anything during the writing.

[Dr. Watson's voice] He does that thing again!

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#58

Post by qewrffewqwfqew »

cuu508 wrote: post #16
qewrffewqwfqew wrote: post #10

Yet 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.

Even without web stuff there are many apps, and there is one keyboard and there are going to be key binding conflicts. Webapps may need low(er) level access to keyboard for legit reasons too. Years ago I was working on webapp that teaches 10-finger typing. It needed to know 'pressed' states of keys like Shift and Alt. There were various browser differences to work around. Luckily the app didn't need to support Polish…

So make it opt-in, and highly visible to the user when it happens.

I get a nag screen when videos in the browser go full screen, telling me loud and clear that expected behaviour is changing and telling me how to get control back. When a website overrides keyboard controls, the first I know about it is when I can't scroll properly, or switch to another tab, or go back, or close the window that's yelling at me and making my machine thrash ...

Disruptively changing modes without notification violates fundamental rules of interaction design, affordances and basic security. How is that okay?

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#59

Post by qewrffewqwfqew »

chinpokomon wrote: post #43
qewrffewqwfqew wrote: post #10

Yet 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.

I feel like that's an old way of thinking. If websites are too grow up and become first class applications, and advancements in Chrome and Firefox are paving that way, we want the browser to become a very thin runtime that doesn't impose any behaviors of its own. It should be mostly transparent to the user that they are in a browser. The fact that different browsers use different shortcuts makes that all the more imp…

> It should be mostly transparent to the user that they are in a browser.

Even if the browser is providing your entire desktop experience, you should be able to switch applications or close them in a predictable way.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#60

Post by kosma »

odiroot wrote: post #54

Oh nice, an article about my native language on HN's front page. Currently living in Germany I actually find our approach to special characters really elegant. I was surprised how much different are German (and French) keyboards. I wonder whether these different layouts can affect for example your programming prowess.

It definitely affects the learning curve. Have a look at the Czech keyboard layout; when I first started learning that language I ended up using the Compose key. Why on Earth would you put diacritics on numerical keys without any kind of logical mapping? At least Polish is 100% logical in this regard (except AltGr-X, but that was unavoidable).

The Russian keyboard layout is similarly annoying as the keys are simply not where you expect them. On most systems you can install a phonetic keyboard driver and kinda roll with it - that is, until you have to use a real Russian keyboard, at which point you have to re-learn from scratch.

Oh, and don't get me started on AZERTY and QWERTZ. What were they thinking?!

The point is that on some layouts you can start typing right away; on other, you have to jump through hoops and get frustrated. Not that we can do anything about it now. Historical reasons.

Post reply on HN