The curious case of disappearing Polish S • Hacker News Board

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#91

Post by gknoy » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 4:48 PM UTC

igonvalue wrote: post #56

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.

I've grown accustomed to writing longer comments or posts in an external editor, simply because I've too frequently experienced browser crashes, or an inadvertent (or absent-minded) screen refresh. Alt-backspace is my worst offender, as I use that ALL the time in the shell for text editing, whereas in a browser it navigates backwards.

Worst of all, I can't seem to find a way to alter the keybinds, or (more importantly) the mouse-5-means-go-back gesture.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#92

Post by gknoy » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 4:50 PM UTC

Ricapar wrote: post #86

acqq wrote: post #30

Earlier 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…

> Users who do "Ctrl-S" to do fast save are certainly a minority. My first reaction: How else do you save?! You mean you actually take your hands off the keyboard, and click the floppy icon in a toolbar? Or even.. click on File > Save? Seriously? I think this assumption as a very strong population bias. With the people I work with.. it's all about keyboard shortcuts. If you don't know your basic keyboard shortcuts, y…

Agreed. I also used ctrl-shift-p to preview Github comments with similar frequency while composing, and get frustrated when I get print dialogues in my mail window.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#93

Post by gknoy » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 4:55 PM UTC

qewrffewqwfqew wrote: post #90

gambiter wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ahem dangerous? When was the last time ANYONE truly used Ctrl-S to save the webpage as HTML? And why would my inability to do it with a keyboard shortcut be a dangerous problem?

Would you be so dismissive if the overridden key were Ctrl-W?

I wouldn't -- the number of times I've inadvertently hit C-w rather than C-s (or M-w when I wanted something else), or control-q when I meant to hit control-a, FAR outnumber (by two orders of magnitude) the number of times I've wanted to close windows or exit my application in that manner.

Perhaps it's my windows upbringing, rather than mac, but Ctrl-F4 / alt-F4 are my preferred window/app closers, and I wish dearly I could unmap the other shortcuts sometimes.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#94

Post by na85 » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 4:58 PM UTC

eatonphil wrote: post #71

na85 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm unaware of any GCC hotkeys.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#95

Post by zokier » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

While most commentary is (fairly) focused on browser behavior and keyboard hijacking, I'd point out another viewpoint: why the frak does every latin alphabet using nation need its own keyboard layout? Couple of diacritics is hardly a good reason to reshuffle the whole keyboard.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#96

Post by rvennar » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 5:53 PM UTC

Ok, but Polish is a dying language, so I don't think it matters that much.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#97

Post by mikeash » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 6:13 PM UTC

acqq wrote: post #30

nothrabannosir wrote: post #21

Earlier 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…

The actual benefit of using ctrl-S (or cmd-S for us Mac folk) is that autosave is still not ubiquitous, and I'd much rather press cmd-S regularly when it's not necessary than fail to press it and then discover that I needed it. The great thing is that it's basically instantaneous now so it costs nothing to press it every few words, which definitely wasn't the case when I acquired the reflex in the late 80s or early 90s.

For this particular default I see no problem in overriding it. I'm sure there's only a minority that routinely uses ctrl-S to save a lot, but essentially nobody uses ctrl-S to save a web page that contains a document they're in the middle of editing, given how esoteric that is and how unlikely it is to produce a useful result.

That's not to say that overriding defaults is good in general. But there's no need to be consistent about it. Overriding ctrl-S is totally different from overriding the arrow keys, for example.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#98

Post by mikeash » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 6:14 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #49

voltagex_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual bug was trivial, the backstory was really interesting - it's the kind of thing you'd hear about on the 99% Invisible podcast. Sometimes verbosity is nice, after all, who doesn't like to share a good bug-hunt story?

It could have been written in quarter of the words.

So could your comment.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#99

Post by mikeash » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 6:17 PM UTC

zokier wrote: post #95

While most commentary is (fairly) focused on browser behavior and keyboard hijacking, I'd point out another viewpoint: why the frak does every latin alphabet using nation need its own keyboard layout? Couple of diacritics is hardly a good reason to reshuffle the whole keyboard.

I'm sure they don't, but it's hard to overcome tradition. I imagine there was no real reason to share layouts across countries in the 1800s when a lot of this stuff was hashed out.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#100

Post by wlesieutre » Tue, Feb 03, 2015, 6:17 PM UTC

krzysz00 wrote: post #78

coldpie wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Though you get an html file and a folder with all the external assets, which I find to be pretty annoying. Safari did a single .webarchive file, but I don't think anyone else ever standardized on something like that.

It often wrecks the layout, but I tend to print to PDF rather than deal with saved html files.