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

71–80 of 118 posts

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#71

Post by eatonphil »

na85 wrote: post #17
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…

It's a symptom of this latest "push all functionality to javascript" fad, and I can't wait until people wake up to the fact that it's just this generation's Flash. In-browser WYSIWYG or markdown editing is not good UX design. Period. Full stop. It's never been better than an offline text editor, and when you try to present a cross-browser experience, this is what inevitably happens.

I wasn't around for it, but I feel like this same thing could be said for cross-platform compilers or VMs... Javascript is just newer. It seems like your argument in the second paragraph could be applied to the infant Java VM or GCC. It seems a little myopic.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#72

Post by coldpie »

yen223 wrote: post #26
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.

I can count with an amputated hand the number of times I had to save a website. Overriding the ctrl+S shortcut is the appropriate move here.

I wonder if the shortcut should be removed. Certainly some people use the feature, but it seems obscure enough that maybe we should pass that combination on to the website, instead.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#73

Post by coldpie »

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.

Google's search results page hijacks all typed input without modifier keys. I often use / to begin an in-page-search in Firefox. But not on Google!

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#75

Post by neohaven »

omaranto wrote: post #62
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…

If you ask me web browser's stole CTRL+S! It used to mean "save my work", but in a browser it means "download a copy of the website I am viewing", which seems totally different to me. I can't remember ever wanting that behavior. I agree with you that websites shouldn't override useful browser behavior, but I'm OK with websites restoring CTRL+S to it's rightful meaning of saving my work.

It means "Save the thing I'm looking at".

Ctrl-S says to your browser "I want to save this".

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#76

Post by expertentipp »

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.

I find the polish programmer layout very intuitive. National layouts for languages using latin alphabet are often failed customizations of design already not optimal and nightmare for foreigner. Italian - need tilde character? sorry. German - dedicated key for each umlaut and brackets cluttered under 7 - 0. French - AZERTY? really?

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#77

Post by hawat »

1) There is something called "polish typewriter keyboard", now is more like a unicorn than computer part but... I really had one in 1995. 2) in `80 Poland produce some computers "on it`s own", like elwro: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Elwro_800... And they had polish typewriter keyboard... 3) And, there was a polish made clone of IBM PC: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazovia_%28komputer%29#mediavie... and, yes - it has a polish typewriter keyboard...

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#78

Post by krzysz00 »

coldpie wrote: post #72
yen223 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can count with an amputated hand the number of times I had to save a website. Overriding the ctrl+S shortcut is the appropriate move here.

I wonder if the shortcut should be removed. Certainly some people use the feature, but it seems obscure enough that maybe we should pass that combination on to the website, instead.

The feature is rather useful for record-keeping purposes (also known as CYA).

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#79

Post by mootothemax »

V-2 wrote: post #32

"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…

It allows for much faster typing in compare to these inconvenient right-Alt shortcuts.

This is really interesting.

As a late-comer to Polish (native British), I've only learned on the right-Alt layout, and the typewriter layout initially gave me The Fear just looking at it.

Then I tried to see how quickly I could type Łódź, and yeah, I think you might be right about the pain - the typewriter layout looks like it should work much better.

For what it's worth, I'm an unconventional - yet effective - touch-typer, and use my left ring-finger for both the Z and X keys. Typing my ZŻŹs isn't too painful.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#80

Post by mootothemax »

qball12 wrote: post #69
dredmorbius wrote: post #46

Or, as I found on a BBC news page earlier today (and reported via feedback), my middle mouse button on link to open in new tab wasn't -- the page was opening in the present tab. Don't break user controls. Seriously. Fucking. Annoying. The tendency of sites to also force all links to open in a new tab is similarly annoying. I've got the means to choose. Leave it to me. Another argument for disabling JS pretty much eve…

yeees.... now-a-days very often without JS you pretty much get an empty HTML. I mean empty as in - empty.

very often without JS you pretty much get an empty HTML

The annoying thing is: if there were a header the browser could send to the server - "JS is turned off" - it'd be trivial to serve a pre-rendered full HTML response.

It's what plenty of e.g. Angular sites do to support the various search engines. Adding one more item to the list of "serve a prenderefndered view if X is true" checks wouldn't do any harm.

Post reply on HN