Subject:
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Re: URL characters
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.publish
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Date:
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Fri, 3 Mar 2000 21:03:54 GMT
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Viewed:
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5146 times
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In lugnet.publish, Anders Isaksson writes:
> > > I think the main problem is that US keyboards/users doesn't care for the
> > > rest of the world, while the rest of the world have to care both for
> > > themselves and the US. (On of my pet peeves: US chauvinism...)
> > Me too -- I know what you mean. And the cluelessness about non-U.S.
> > conventions is IMHO even worse than the chauvinism...
> Agreed, but in my vocabulary 'clueless' rings harsher than 'chauvinist', am I
> totally out of line there?
Oh, not at all -- that's exactly what I meant. U.S. cluelessness about
non-U.S. conventions is even worse than U.S. chauvinism. At least chauvinists
know that other conventions exist. :-)
> > One thing to remember, though: The A in ASCII does stand for American. :-)
>
> I don't have all the messages in the thread left (and am off-line, as usual),
> but I'm sure my message never mentioned ASCII, but ISO (which means
> International Standardization Organization, or something like that) :-)
Yes, but the reason ISO-8859-1 (for example) has the ~ at character #126 is
because ISO-8859-1 includes the earlier ASCII set as a subset. Thus (unless
I'm mistaken), any low-numbered ISO-8859-1 character is also an ASCII character
at the same ordinal position. Naturally, the plain tilde character, being part
of ASCII for decades, shouldn't be ruled out as a valid character just because
it is an extra keystroke on some keyboards. In fact, many old American
keyboards were missing certain ASCII characters, and needed sometimes 3 or 4
keys (or sometimes chord sequences) to be pressed in order to summon them.
I remember a keyboard back in the early 80's which required something like
Ctrl-Shift-6 to get a ^ (plain caret)...that's still only 3 keys, but I'm
sure there were some with 4, I just can't recall what they were.
> Firstly, we have two different Alt keys on our keyboards, the left one is
> 'Alt', the right one is 'Alt Gr', and it's 'Alt Gr' to get the tilde, not
> Shift. Now let's check...
>
> ~ (Alt Gr)Tilde-Space 1T, no space
> ~ (Alt Gr)Tilde-(Alt Gr)Space 1T, no space
> ~~ (Alt Gr)Tilde-(Alt Gr)Tilde 2T (Naturally!)
OK, so the shortest sequence to get a plain tilde is pressing 3 keys?
That's not too bad after all. Here, we have to press 2 keys -- Shift plus
the tilde/backtick key.
> In fact Tilde-Anything comes as 'Tilde' 'Anything' *except* for Tilde-Space
> and the few letters that can have a Tilde on top (ñ Tilde-n, õ Tilde-o, ã
> Tilde-a).
>
> To make (C-)programming even worse for us Europeans, the brackets {}[] also
> use (Alt Gr), because our national characters åäöÅÄÖ occupy the keyboard space
> where they are 'normally' located (I'm actually *happy* if I can find an
> English keyboard when programming in C!). And ^(caret) is also a 'dead key'
> like ~(tilde), so you never know if you pressed it until you press the next
> key!
>
> No wonder Pascal was invented in Europe!
Hmm, but Pascal uses ^ all over the place (for pointers).
> Sometimes I even think the French have done the right thing (for once) with
> their keyboards:
>
> They have the upper row (with numbers and special characters) turned upside
> down, so you use Shift to get the digits, and all the special characters are
> reached unshifted! The numerical keyboard is always normal, so you have both
> digits and everything else without shifting (OTOH, they have swapped a few
> letters, just to make sure they differ from everybody else :-)
Oh, WOW -- that is AWESOME! It would take a bit of getting used to, but, man,
I'll bet you could type real text SO much faster that way! Very nice!
> If you want a really different experience, you should try a Russian keyboard,
> with both Cyrillic characters, and our ones (but on completely different
> locations!)
How about a Russian or Cyrillic keyboard driver running on a U.S. keyboard?
(Oh, my head would hurt!)
--Todd
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Message has 3 Replies:
 | | Re: URL characters (off-topic)
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| Todd Lehman skrev i meddelandet ... (...) Pointers...??? Who needs pointers? We're talking about Pascal, right? :-) With the Object Pascal implemented in Borland Delphi, you can get a looong way without ever using pointers (consciously). BTW, I'm (...) (25 years ago, 3-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
| | | Re: URL characters
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| (...) What about just using a Dvorak keyboard? I've never seem one, but it is designed to lessen finger movements across the keyboard, where as QWERTY was designed to slow people down so their typewriters wouldn't jam... --Bram Bram Lambrecht / o o (...) (25 years ago, 3-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
| | | Re: URL characters
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| Todd: [...] (...) Assuming we still are talking URL's, it is discouraged/invalid because there is a significant risk that people get it wrong if they type it in (which they shouldn't do). You are right that it shouldn't be necessary to rule it out (...) (25 years ago, 5-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: URL characters
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| Todd Lehman skrev i meddelandet ... (...) Agreed, but in my vocabulary 'clueless' rings harsher than 'chauvinist', am I totally out of line there? (...) I don't have all the messages in the thread left (and am off-line, as usual), but I'm sure my (...) (25 years ago, 3-Mar-00, to lugnet.publish)
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