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The curious case of disappearing Polish S

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Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#21

Post by nothrabannosir »

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…

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 user why Ctrl+S works in Word, Excel, Powerpoint, but not in Medium?

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#22

Post by nathell »

> Our extra characters might look very much like Latin equivalents, and amount to only about 8% of letter distribution (you will hate them playing Scrabble)

Polish competitive Scrabble player here. It's not so much hate as a love-hate relationship. While it can be frustrating to be left with a vowelless rack containing a Ź in the endgame, for the most part these letters are quite desirable. Indeed, three of them (Ą, Ę, Ó) are vowels worth 5 points each, and only two of them (Ć and Ź) don't appear in any two-letter word. Even the Ź is fairly easy to get rid of, given an open enough (read: not completely blocked) board. They're nowhere near as irritating as the Q (and to a lesser extent Z) in English Scrabble.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#23

Post by wtbob »

colinplamondon wrote: post #20
takeda wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not mention the sites that hijack "/" for their search. I don't think there's a single site that hijacked keys which ended up being a good idea (at least from my experience). I think browsers need option to disable key hijacking.

It'd drive me crazy if Gmail _didn't_ do that. Love the keyboard shortcuts, including and especially the ones that override. Highly productive compared to the alternative.

> Highly productive compared to the alternative.

I dunno; I really preferred the alternative I used to have: reading email in a proper email client. The only reason I use the web client now is that it's easier when I'm also using my phone to read mail away from my computer. And I'm strongly considering just returning to desktop-only email; that's how much I miss reading mail in gnus.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#24

Post by duskwuff »

derekp7 wrote: post #8
seppo0010 wrote: post #7

I 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 benefici…

Indeed, allowing the browser's default Ctrl+S action to take effect would be actively harmful. It'd trigger a behavior that's completely useless to the user (saving the active web page as HTML), but which could easily be mistaken for doing something useful.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#25

Post by cezarywojcik »

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…

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.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#26

Post by yen223 »

cezarywojcik wrote: post #25
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…

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.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#27

Post by M4v3R »

voltagex_ wrote: post #13
kosma wrote: post #4

I 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…

Did the drivers (or tray apps) bind those keys? What for?

Tray apps were binding those keys to open settings panels or tweaking driver configuration on the fly.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#28

Post by guard-of-terra »

perokreco wrote: post #5
guard-of-terra wrote: post #2

I 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.

You're certainly right, third then.

Re: The curious case of disappearing Polish S

#30

Post by acqq »

nothrabannosir wrote: post #21
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…

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 writing documents. I don't know actually anybody who does. Autosave in Word functions as it should (not needing any user action) since at least 1998. My code editors and IDEs all do autosave too before compiling. What's the auctual benefit of ever using Ctrl-S in the middle of writing?

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