From: Aaron Crane Date: 10:49 on 31 Aug 2004 Subject: Fonts, Unicode, i18n, blah A word of background. I know about Unicode. I can distinguish UTF-8 and other encodings. I have a working knowledge of several non-Latin scripts. My system can happily display text with nicely-rendered fonts, even in Arabic. I've given a conference talk about how to get this stuff working in Unix. Today, $boss said "download Skype so we can teleconference". OK, thought I, no problem. Download. Run. It's all in Korean. I don't know any Korean. Hate. As far as I can tell, the damn thing has assumed that the fact I have Korean fonts installed is an obvious indicator that I want to be spoken to in Korean (and not, for example, an indicator that I'd rather see pretty text I can't read than lots of boxes containing Unicode code points). I find it hard to imagine what sort of cluelessness could give rise to this pestilence, this fetid ordure, this pollution of sanity. Hate hate hate.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 12:50 on 31 Aug 2004 Subject: Re: Fonts, Unicode, i18n, blah > As far as I can tell, the damn thing has assumed that the fact I have Korean > fonts installed is an obvious indicator that I want to be spoken to in > Korean (and not, for example, an indicator that I'd rather see pretty text I > can't read than lots of boxes containing Unicode code points). I find it > hard to imagine what sort of cluelessness could give rise to this > pestilence, this fetid ordure, this pollution of sanity. The web is full of it. When I was on an anime kick last year, I set my browser up so all the Japanese text on the pages would come up in Japanese. I can't read Japanese, but at least having all the right fonts and options set I get the text to fit in the boxes, and I can sometimes even paste it into a translator and get something back that's readable. (surf surf surf) Funny, I thought I remembered this page being in English last time I came by. (surf more) Hmmm... that's odd, I know this one used to be in English. Did I leave out an "en" in the URL? No... (tweak, tweak, turn off Japanese in the preferences...) Oh, that's better. (poke, tweak) Oh. Cripes.
From: Ann Barcomb Date: 13:00 on 31 Aug 2004 Subject: Google also. (was: Re: Fonts, Unicode, i18n, blah) Peter wrote: > Hmmm... that's odd, I know this one used to be in English. Did I leave out > an "en" in the URL? No... ...Which reminds me of what I hate about Google. When I type 'www.google.com' that's the website I want. I do not want 'www.google.nl', nor do I want you to require a cookie to store the fact that I want the URL I entered. It isn't even checking my locale settings--it is using my IP for its assumptions. 'www.google.com/en' no longer works; it was probably too easy to remember. Stop trying to assume you know what I want better than I do.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 13:14 on 31 Aug 2004 Subject: Re: Google also. (was: Re: Fonts, Unicode, i18n, blah) > It isn't even checking my locale settings--it is using my IP for its > assumptions. 'www.google.com/en' no longer works; it was probably too > easy to remember. Probably got mail from daft punters who followed someone's stored links to google on a web page and couldn't understand why google was suddenly in a different language.
From: Tony Bowden Date: 21:01 on 02 Sep 2004 Subject: Re: Google also. (was: Re: Fonts, Unicode, i18n, blah) On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 05:00:48AM -0700, Ann Barcomb wrote: > ...Which reminds me of what I hate about Google. When I type 'www.google.com' > that's the website I want. I do not want 'www.google.nl', nor do I want > you to require a cookie to store the fact that I want the URL I entered. > 'www.google.com/en' no longer works; it was probably too This was very irritating when I was at Foaf/Foo. I quickly learnt to go to www.google.co.uk Interestingly I've never noticed google.com redirect to co.uk. Tony
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