On ven, 2002-03-08 at 04:07, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
On Thu, Mar 07, 2002 at 11:34:53PM -0800, Brion L.
VIBBER wrote:
On ??a??, 2002-03-07 at 22:07, Tomasz
Wegrzanowski wrote:
Just see articles about anything Japanese on
English Wikipedia.
They contain Japanese names of everything.
Sure, but more often kanji than kana, so special kana markup wouldn't be
that big a win. See the thread "International Upgrades"; the vague plan
is to standardise the internal character set and present the wikipedias
in Unicode to capable browsers. (Please comment!)
Uhm, right. But most non-japanese people don't know names of too many kanjis,
so kanjis aren't that important. ;) On the other hand more people that
it is usually though know kana, so it might be beneficial for them.
But, what are people who don't know much Japanese going to _do_ with
kana?
Speaking as someone with a very very poor command of the Japanese
language, my own usage of Japanese characters on the non-Japanese
wikipedias is limited to:
* Demonstration of japanese characters in articles about the language
* Showing the local form of a place, personal, or other name in
articles about Japan and Japanese culture
The former are a limited genre (Jimbo's "special case"), and the latter
are overwhelmingly kanji.
Hmmm. Now I think that some general method would be
more useful:
&katakana_a; &kanji_b; &hebrew_c; or &cyrilic_d;
Hmm. Perhaps you should take this up with the w3 and get these put into
the next XHTML standard. :)
As a result,
we should be able to use the customary input methods or
cut-n-paste to put any characters into any of the wikis, which is
certainly a lot easier than looking up entities or running text through
a UTF-8-to-entities convertor (which is what I currently do).
Hmmm. Wouldn't that need some modifications to browsers ?
Only if you've got a really limited browser. (Perhaps Netscape 4, the
bane of web developers worldwide, or a text-mode browser in a non UTF-8
locale.)
Mozilla/Netscape 6, Internet Explorer 5+, Konqueror (if fonts are set up
right), you should have no problem. Configuring keyboards/input methods,
of course, is a system-dependent matter. (Japanese input is notoriously
difficult to set up on Unixish systems that aren't running a primarily
Japanese locale; it's quite easy on relatively current Mac or Windows
systems, though.)
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)