programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
These are available as bumper stickers and t-shirts:
Here's my rhetorical question to you: why is this funny?
Here's hoping the next programmer who sees this is laughing, too-- and for the right reasons.
Im always having problems moving java files between linux and windows... all the accents becomes squares.
Federico on March 27, 2008 2:05 AMAm I the only one who gets it but doesn't think it's funny?
spotcatbug on March 27, 2008 2:11 AMYou're not alone spotcatbug. This is nerd humor of the worst kind...
Aside from that a great set of articles.
Broham on March 27, 2008 2:20 AMIt is funny how on the rss feed for this post there is an advert exhorting us: "Don't denormalize your data just to write reports!"
So, shouldn't your title be
I #9829; Unicode
?
a href="http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F06.html"http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F06.html/a
Grandma: [singing] How many roads must a man walk down before you can
call him a man?
Homer: Seven!
Lisa: No, Dad, it's a rhetorical question.
Homer: Rhetorical, eh? Eight!
Lisa: Dad, do you even know what "rhetorical" means?
Homer: [incredulous] Do I know what "rhetorical" means?!
@Ole: Isn't yours the same as the one on the T-shirt?
(Now see, if you'd proposed "I#6533;Unicode" instead, then my comment could have been a meta-joke based on the fact that my browser's font sucks, but I checked the page source and you really did write "I#65533;Unicode", so it's not as funny.)
@dannygutters: It's a rhetorical question because, although a truthful answer is possible, Jeff in fact did *not* expect you to bother with one. "Rhetorical" doesn't mean "unanswerable"; it just means that the questioner doesn't expect to receive a (literal) answer.
So, why is *this* question rhetorical?
Anonymous Cowherd on March 27, 2008 3:51 AM@Anonymous:
Trick question; it's not rhetorical at all!
I use Windows, and I've never installed Photoshop
What happened to the advice in "Programming Tip: Learn a Graphics Editor"?
Sean on March 27, 2008 4:10 AMSean-- you're absolutely right. Paint.NET is awesome!
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000993.html
Prior to that I used Paint Shop Pro, until it became unbearable bloatware that took over my machine..
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000973.html
Jeff Atwood on March 27, 2008 4:20 AMWhat happened to the advice in "Programming Tip: Learn a Graphics Editor"?
Sean, maybe Paint Shop Pro was good enough then, and now Paint.Net?
Darn! Beat me by 7s ;-)
Franois on March 27, 2008 4:28 AM"Gripping hand." Loved it. Not enough fans left out there anymore.
fudge on March 27, 2008 4:43 AMWow. I printed up the exact same thing a few years ago and hung it on my office door (while fighting a particularly nasty issue with an unnamed language on PocketPC).
I thought I was being original. :-)
Tim Lesher on March 27, 2008 4:56 AMMaybe it was the phrasing or the fact that intonation doesn't travel well on the internet (first there was bold, italic, and underline... next, sarcasm and rolleye text decoration!) But when you said "Why is this funny" I sort of thought you were implying that it wasn't- That proper use of unicode was serious business and there was (dad voice) "nothing funny about it"- The same way one would ask that if someone made an offensive joke or something. Perhaps better phrasing? On the other hand, I might have been entirely alone in that.
Alex on March 27, 2008 5:24 AMMy reaction was more like "groaaan... that's not funny... that's so sad!" Like... "aww, poor Unicode; people can't even heart you properly because you're so crazy."
Domenic on March 27, 2008 6:01 AMA couple of years back most linux fonts rendered the replacement character (#65533;) as something very similar to a comma which was
weird/confusing/hard to notice. I mentioned it in a mailing list and it was fixed up promptly.
Other unicode related links I found useful:
http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ggbaker/reference/characters/
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/03/24/95235.aspx
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
I guess Joel wrote a site never hosted at a data center in the US that charged by bandwidth and traffic. and WTF is
"So I have an announcement to make: if you are a programmer working in 2003 and you don't know the basics of characters, character sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch you, I'm going to punish you by making you peel onions for 6 months in a submarine. I swear I will."
I don't think all he'll do in that sub. Geez, I'll write 32 byte characters just to avoid that. And how many job apps have I sent to Israel...let me check... oh yeah, 0. I grew up in a 64k world, and unless they ask I code for it.
And Atwood you rock.
Frank on March 27, 2008 6:32 AMHate to be a jerk, but this only marginally relates to Unicode.
In your example, it's the font causing the problems. Font designers typically map a specific glyph that maps to any characters they haven't accounted for. The font is deficient, and the WingDing heart 'character' doesn't exist as a heart in all fonts. The mapped glyph can be anything, but convention is a box.
Unicode is boring, but check out OpenType and text processing. Rendering text to pixels sounds a lot easier than it really is when you consider ligatures and scripts.
- I hate the fact that on my mac "'s is different from my pc "'s. Different types of single quotes too. Now that was a retarded decision in the history of computing.
I call on the world to rid themselves of all the silly permutations of scripts, ligatures, and other nasty things. Wanna draw pictures, use paint. ASCII forever man!
Summary: I don't see why this was blogged about.
codeaunich on March 27, 2008 6:34 AMI use -- all the time too. Sometimes it gets converted into a dash by whatever software I'm using, sometimes not. Either way, the message is clear. The double-hyphen is a pretty well-known internet convention for expressing a "dash", similar to *asterisks* for bold or _underscores_ for underlining.
Rhywun on March 27, 2008 7:06 AMUnicode is da BOM
Harold on March 27, 2008 7:48 AMIt's a follow up to a previous post on Internationalisation - Does your software pass the Turkey Test? Or at least an addition. Handy things to know for software developers. That's why it was blogged about.
`Josh on March 27, 2008 8:25 AMI just wish people knew UTF-16 was a variable-width encoding, like UTF-8. It is not a fixed-width encoding like UTF-32! Why do so many people not know that?
James Justin Harrell on March 27, 2008 10:13 AM"Mainly because they have to be escaped in XML ..."
WTF? Does some tired old blogger need to write an article titled, "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About XML (No Excuses!)" for you?
James Justin Harrell on March 27, 2008 10:42 AMSingle-alphabet minded bastards...
Sean on March 27, 2008 11:42 AMWhy do you think anyone finds it funny?
Peteris Krumins on March 27, 2008 11:44 AMFor extra credit: what is the BOM?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte-order_mark
Jeff Atwood on March 27, 2008 11:48 AMReally, that question is not a rhetorical question, you expect me to answer, "This is funny because the box is representative of displaying a unicode value with an incorrect encoding scheme".
Maybe the rhetorical question is what kind of person am I that finds this funny.
dannygutters on March 27, 2008 12:00 PMrhetorical question n. A question to which no answer is expected, often used for rhetorical effect.
No answer is expected because every developer worth his or her salt *should* already know why it's funny-- no explanation required.
Jeff Atwood on March 27, 2008 12:05 PMIt's funny because, fingers crossed, someday UTF-8 will take over the world and we'll never have to read another article like "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" again. Text will flow seamlessly anywhere and in any language. And that will be a beautiful day. And these slogans will be a badge of honor of to those of us who had to deal with crap like installing an auxiliary library and learning a whole new API just to be able to output a different language.
Rhywun on March 27, 2008 12:05 PMI agree Unicode should be implemented on all software No Excuses! It's not difficult...
Windows is a problem in that cutting and pasting between standard Windows apps fails.... Why does copying a Unicode string from and HTML editor to Word to Outlook not work when they are all written by Microsoft!
The one I love is your comment "As it turns out, Windows-1252 *can* be a better default for web strings than UTF-8"
This is false *except* on Windows because Windows seems to make a distinction between Ascii text and Unicode text because it uses UTF-16
If it used UTF-8 then (at least in America and the UK) Ascii 0-128 and Unicode are the same ...
On one hand, I understand the need to support characters outside the standard American alphabet. On the other hand, I don't want to do a lot of extra work for the 99% of the apps that I write that have a 99% North American audience. On the gripping hand, perhaps knowing the ASCII charset will come in as handy in the next 20 years as knowing EBCDIC has in the last 20 years.
Chris Chubb on March 27, 2008 12:10 PMit's funny because people are answering the rhetorical question (including me now!).
John Grimes on March 27, 2008 12:12 PMI remember the day I spent 10 hours fixing the question mark bug that a user reported. argh
Jesus DeLaTorre on March 27, 2008 12:14 PMHow about this one:
I#65533;Unicode
Ole
Ole Eichhorn on March 27, 2008 12:26 PMBut Jeff, why do you still avoid using goodness of Unicode?
For instance, why use '--' when there is '—' available?
So, do I have to not read the link that you send us to before answering about the BOM?
But, we use UTF-8. In UTF-8, you don't *need* the BOM.
http://unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#29
Jeff Davis on March 27, 2008 12:27 PMI guess his — key is broken.
Rhywun on March 27, 2008 12:29 PMGreat article.
Even greater use of "on the gripping hand" in Chris Chubb's comment!
Chris on March 27, 2008 12:32 PMThe only comment I can think of follows:
Good job on having the picture a png instead of a jpg. Trust me, it's something to be proud of.
Matt_ on March 27, 2008 12:33 PMI guess his — key is broken.
I don't care for “” versus "" , or — versus --. Mainly because they have to be escaped in XML whereas the simple ASCII equivalents don't. Yet another thing I don't want to think about.. and I'm not a stickler for perfect aesthetics aka designer. I use Windows, and I've never installed Photoshop :)
Jeff Atwood on March 27, 2008 12:42 PMIt's funny because there's obviously no need for some of us to write in kanji. ;)
Akira on March 27, 2008 12:53 PMSpeaking of the Byte Order Mark, I wonder how a "Unicode is the BOM" bumper sticker would go over.
HitScan on March 27, 2008 12:57 PMI don't care
Way to go, Jeff!
Andrew R. on March 27, 2008 1:18 PMJeff, I don't really know about XML, but in HTML you don't have to escape all the typographical characters. I guess in XML you needn't either. Just install a SmartyPants plugin for Movable Type and you are ready to go.
Nikolai on March 27, 2008 1:42 PMI don't care for “” versus "" , or — versus --
This is the “aesthetics designer” equivalent of a tall pile of “elsifs.”
Yes, it gets the job done and we know what you mean but they betoken either ignorance or a lack of craftsmanship. When your copyeditor or graphics designer bitches about cleaning up em dashes, s/he isn’t just being a prissy fussbucket — they’re displaying “craftsmanship,” a personal quality I’ve noticed some programmers hold in high regard.
Paul Souders on March 27, 2008 1:44 PMWhen your copyeditor or graphics designer bitches about cleaning up em dashes
Go team!
Many programmers' English skills seem to deteriorate in direct proportion to their programming skills. This is sad.
-fred
Fred Fnord on March 27, 2008 1:51 PMI just designed and ordered a shirt with "I #x2764 Unicode" on it.
Thanks for the inspiration: http://bka-bonn.de/wordpress/?p=73
Kai on March 27, 2008 1:54 PMThe "Mac" version is also what you see in Firefox under Linux, when a page has broken character-coding.
The bumperstickers are a little large for my taste, but if these were done in, say, 2"x0.6" or similar size, they'd be perfect for adorning laptop lids (like the Coding Horror sticker I currently have there)...
Randy Ray on March 27, 2008 1:59 PMIn which encoding scheme is the heart glyph encoded as a single byte?
Jens on March 28, 2008 2:00 AMWhat happen? Somebody set up us the BOM. All your Unicode are belong to us.
The annoying practice of using backticks and footmarks for quotation marks was due to IBM's decision to make the backtick and apostrophe look like the real single quote marks.
John on March 28, 2008 2:27 AMYour title shouldn't be "I #9829; Unicode" or "I ? Unicode" but rather "I #65533; Unicode" -- which is the UTF-8 encoded string displayed in an ISO-8859-1 context.
Jesse Mullan on March 28, 2008 2:55 AMJens: Well, for starters, there's the interpretation of extended ASCII that the old IBM-PC DOS computers used, which IIRC stuck it in somewhere in one of the first 32 characters that weren't actually used as control characters.
(After checking: Yup, it's at 0x03, with the other card suits in 0x04, 0x05, and 0x06. See, for instance, http://www.jimprice.com/jim-asc.shtml.)
Brooks Moses on March 28, 2008 3:00 AMI would also hope that Microsoft can stop confusing its misuse of "Unicode" terminology in apps and documentation as UTF-16. Try saving from Notepad as "Unicode" format and you get double-byte UTF-16 text files. Any reference to "Unicode text" in MSDN Library really means UTF-16 or perhaps some variation.
The rest of the world knows UTF-8 is unicode, too. MS just prefers UTF-16 for what it considers most efficient when handling what could be any language in the world.
Shawn Poulson on March 28, 2008 3:02 AMWell, using Unicode is fine, but you can still get that glyph if the font being used for display doesn't have that symbol defined. I had this very problem recently in Outlook. The customer had a plugin that, after it had done some processing, they wanted to prefix the subject line with a unicode character. However, some users had configured their outlook to use different fonts - and of course, not all these fonts defined the character they wanted to prefix the subject line with...
Andy Burns on March 28, 2008 3:05 AM"I don't care for “” versus "" , or — versus --. Mainly because they have to be escaped in XML whereas the simple ASCII equivalents don't."
Where did you get that idea? Sure, you can type these things as escaped HTML entities but you can also simply enter the characters directly (via Character Map or Alt+Num sequences). If your HTML file has charset=utf-8 (as it should) then the literal characters will display just fine.
Chris Nahr on March 28, 2008 3:31 AM I guess his — key is broken.
I don't care for “” versus "" , or — versus --. Mainly because they
have to be escaped in XML whereas the simple ASCII equivalents don't.
Whut? I've used UTF-8 encoding and —, “, ”, and even characters which don't have a HTML escape code, like "circle of commas" (http://tipotheday.com/2007/08/26/wtf-is-this-character/) in XML, XSLT and XHTML without problems. Just save and serve the thing with the right encoding.
Victor on March 28, 2008 4:06 AMLol, Unicode.
Bill on March 28, 2008 6:06 AMdisclamer
I am not a programmer, I wrote some thousand conceptually-flawed lines in C, some thousand lines in perl I cannot understand anymore (I did not need comments at that time) and two SQL apps, the first one being a journey to discovering that databases are intended to be indexed and not just a long list of rows
/disclamer
I also loosly run a personal blog, powered by mysql. Which I upgraded from version 3.x to 4.x (or something like that).
And the world ended that day...
I ended up with a complete mess in my non-English version, with questions marks, double questions marks, squares and other things I cannot name. I did not even know that there are alphabets with three dots over an 'a'!
Oh man - how I hated the [censored] [censored] who introduced the UTF versus ASCII vsersus god-knows-what-but-i-dont-give-a-you-know-what-anyway. I just wanted to upgrade my mysql and ended up in the middle of a Discovery Channel series called "the mysteries of encoding" -- the original was in Korean, dubbed to Swahili and then translated by a ethnology graduate.
This is just to say that while such things are probably exciting for real programmers (or are not, dunno), the typical [insert you favourite Windows or Linux or Mac or WARP or VMS system] dummies which I am part of should never notice.
I spent nights on that nightmare (finally going native UTF) browsing though literraly hundred of sites loaded with cries from people with the same problem.
This said, I should have probably read the upgrade notes before going ahead.
Wojtek on March 28, 2008 8:16 AMHave some fun with Unicode ....
http://www.revfad.com/flip.html
u#653;op #477;p#305;sdn #387;u#305;#647;#305;#633;#653; #654;#633;#647;
Jaster on March 28, 2008 8:32 AMROFL!!!! I Love it!!!
I just printed this out to add to my "cubicle bumperstickers" right next to:
/(bb|[^b]{2})/
A nice piece of friday humor for sure...
Sean Patterson on March 28, 2008 11:14 AMWojtek:
That's because MySQL (used to, at least—I don't know if it still does) defaults to the Swedish Latin-1 locale and encoding.
Absolutely everything should use some encoding of Unicode. If they disagree about that, things _will_ break. At the very least, databases and file storage should use one of the Unicode encodings even if your front-end doesn't (provided you convert your encodings properly), which will mean you won't have to mass-convert your database later…
Chris Chubb:
For those “99%” who just use ASCII, UTF-8 is byte-for-byte identical.
Jeff:
The only reserved characters in XML are , , , and the appropriate quote mark within an attribute values. Everything else is fair game, provided it's properly represented by your encoding (which should be UTF-8 anyway). That's why XML only provides named entities for , and amp; (possibly quot;? I don't think so, though)—you don't *need* any others.
Mo on March 28, 2008 12:08 PMAlso, where you say “no HTML” preceding this comment box, it would imply that comments are interpreted as plain text.
The output of my previous comment suggests that it's not :(
Mo on March 28, 2008 12:09 PMAs long as `this' practice is ``done away with'' ... using backticks and foot marks to fake up quotation marks is ugly and pointless
Joe on March 28, 2008 12:49 PMit is not funny.
offler on March 28, 2008 1:55 PMLOL!
Seriously, though, I am looking at a number of "time saving" tools for bulk file operations (sequenced renaming, cropping, applying colour profiles, etc) that I have on my desktop, which, after all these years, are still saving me no time at all because they can't be used with Unicode filenames (a lot of my files that need to be organised are in Japanese). So, I have to rename the files to ASCII, run the batch process, then rename them back again. I often have to temporarily move them elsewhere to avoid renaming an entire folder tree.
The pain of this is, they claim (as it turns out, falsely) to be ready for WinNT, Win2K, WinXP and/or Vista.
Not to mention that Unicode is nice for English filenames when you need colons, quotes, and question marks in them.
Yes, I think after all these years we are entitled to have natural English filenames even though some folk still insist on using 8.3 as a "badge of honour".
"I don't want to do a lot of extra work for the 99% of the apps that I write that have a 99% North American audience."
This is a common objection, but it is self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps if your applications actually worked in other countries you'd have a bigger market? And perhaps the market outside the US, being billions of people more, might actually be more profitable?
(Yes, I realise you are probably referring to in-house applications, which are a different kettle of fish, but it's fun to niggle (;P) ).
And I think people should rethink this arbitrary 1% plucked from the air: 25%-80% of households in the US in any given area are multilingual (based on a quick Google, may not be totally accurate, but enough to prove the point). Most western countries are absolutely multicultural.
That's a lot of frustrated customers to ignore.
And that's not taking into account multinational companies and government departments, either. I wonder if Homeland Security needs to be multilingual? Hmmm... "sorry Sir, that latest message from Al Quaeda was in Unicode... and we can't read it."
Paul Coddington on March 29, 2008 3:04 AM@Shawn: Are you absolutely sure about that?
I could have sworn Windows used UCS-2 (and didn't handle characters beyond 0xFFFF), rather than UTF-16.
Mo on March 29, 2008 3:07 AMI don't care for “” versus "" , or — versus --. Mainly because they have to be escaped in XML whereas the simple ASCII equivalents don't.
This, in response to your own article decrying ignorance of Unicode, is saddening (or brilliant satire). Perhaps you were laughing for the wrong reasons after all.
Konrad on March 29, 2008 3:53 AM"I could have sworn Windows used UCS-2 (and didn't handle characters beyond 0xFFFF), rather than UTF-16."
I believe NT originally used UCS-2 but that was extended at some point to handle UTF-16 strings with multi-word characters (whatever they're called). The .NET Framework has always supported UTF-16, not just UCS-2.
Chris Nahr on March 29, 2008 6:43 AMThis, in response to your own article decrying ignorance of Unicode, is saddening (or brilliant satire). Perhaps you were laughing for the wrong reasons after all.
You tell me, then-- the RSS feed for this blog is marked "UTF-8"
http://feeds.feedburner.com/codinghorror/
?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?
Yet when any “” or — characters make its way into my feed (usually in quoted text), those characters are tagged by the feed validator.
These characters are tagged by the validator as "description contains bad characters" with "The XML encoding does not appear to match the characters used." Each instance of “” or — results in one error from the validator.
I also get emails from people who subscribe via FeedBurner's email service; these “” or — characters are unprintable in the emails.
Jeff Atwood on March 29, 2008 8:11 AMI do not know why, but I do find it funny. My mind inserts happiness where I have the possibility to. Good topic though. We are all robots.
hellyeahdude.com on March 30, 2008 1:09 PM@ Fred Fnord,
Many programmers' English skills seem to deteriorate in direct proportion to their programming skills. This is sad.
Have you ever written a line of code? Based on that comment I would think no. The best programmers I have ever had the pleasure to meet could care less whether or not anybody can understand their day-to-day English skills. It's not their English skills that make them *ROCKSTAR* hackers, it's their hacker skills that make them *ROCKSTAR* hackers. No, there is *ZERO* correlation between the two. Sorry.
M. David Peterson on March 31, 2008 2:30 AMOh, and BTW... I'm *#$!ing Jeff Atwood! :D
Oh, and one last BTW... I'm I the only one who finds it ironic that you chose to compare *English* skills and programming skills in a post focused towards the (in)proper usage of UTF-* encoding?
M. David Peterson on March 31, 2008 2:36 AMs/inproper/improper
M. David Peterson on March 31, 2008 2:38 AMThe solution: entire world should learn Esperanto.
Vadim on March 31, 2008 5:43 AMIsn't it funny because both the question mark and the box mean that the current encoding doesn't know about that code point?
So literally translated both sentences say "I 'don't know' Unicode"
Please don't eat me.
Andy on March 31, 2008 7:44 AMI ? Unicode too... :)
Seriously though, its a pain to make you unicode app work nicely with the rest of the world. I mean, what character do you substitute for ""? Clearly "n". But what about something like "#8594;"? Do we expect our program to substitute it with ascii art like "--"? And thats before we even get onto the subject of foreign characters...
There is no pain the other way at least... :)
Jheriko on March 31, 2008 8:29 AMIts funny because programmers think with Unicode the box will be filled with a heart symbol that is typographically correct.
Until such colossal yet reliable Unicode character sets exist, typesetters will still be struggling with multi-language texts.
DelphiUser on April 1, 2008 2:16 AM@Frank 32 bits, I hope you mean.
Montana Rowe on April 9, 2008 11:08 AMI've been working on a corpus blogs recently in the context of a summer project. This corpus has been gathered by another university and has a major case of Unicoditis.
Most documents, including those that are written in English, suffer from badly mangled data. Different documents are mangled in different inconsistant ways. 2 or 3 byte sequences of UTF-8 in the documents may be translated individually from their meaning in a single-byte encoding to UTF-8 encoding, sometimes more than once.
This is incredibly frustrating. I #9829; Unicode indeed and am looking forward to days when the majority of plain text will be utf-8 encoded.
Alex on July 3, 2008 2:49 AMHmmm your comments system ate my heart into a numbered entity.
Alex on July 3, 2008 2:50 AMNot that you'll read it, but, Mr Peterson:
Have you ever written a line of code? Based on that comment I would think no. The best
programmers I have ever had the pleasure to meet could care less whether or not anybody
can understand their day-to-day English skills. It's not their English skills that make them
*ROCKSTAR* hackers, it's their hacker skills that make them *ROCKSTAR* hackers. No,
there is *ZERO* correlation between the two. Sorry.
First, yes, I'm a programmer. Any claims that either of us is a better programmer than the other would clearly be silly in a forum like this, so I'll just say that, only counting since college, I've been working in positions involving software engineering for 10 years.
Second, I have met a lot of, as you call them, '*ROCKSTAR* hackers'. I tend to divide them up into two subsets: the ones that YOU would consider 'rock stars' and the ones that I would consider rock stars. And I have a much more exacting definition than you do, I'm sure. This is because in past jobs I have been the one trying to clean up after your rock stars, who in general are the ones who are incapable of or uninterested in correctly documenting their code and/or their apps (if they're writing internal tools), totally immune to design documentation (let alone having the ability to actually write or revise it) and very resistant to decent collaboration on products.
For me, a real rockstar coder is someone who is excellent at writing code, conservative about documenting it, and capable of interacting with other human beings in ways that make them a pleasant addition to a team. An example would be the friend of mine who works at Google as a consultant now, pulling down better than $200k a year from them. If he weren't able to coherently document things, write project specifications, and produce excellent code, all at the same time, he literally wouldn't be able to command half of that from Google.
So by all means, use your 'rockstar coders'. And I, with a team half the size, but with people who actually know English and can communicate and do real design work and who are actually organized, will get a better product out, in half the time, and it will be maintainable.
-fred
PS: By the way, a proper grasp of at least one language (and preferably two) is in any case a prerequisite for being a well-rounded human being.
Fred Fnord on August 27, 2008 6:48 AMjoke_(but not so much)_mode
Men, when Indians invented (or at least formalised) the notion of 0 as a number and shown the advantages of positional numbering system over non-positional numbering systems, almost all we agreed in few centuries to use that system.
Not even a minimally matematically minded person would today complain of latin numbering system is not enough represented on modern calculators to reflect the cultural influence and blablabla of Roman Empire.
But even if Phoenician shown comparable advantages of RISC (reduced set of characters :P ) alphabets over hieroglyphs and pictograms a millennia before indian numbering system, literates, humanists and philosophers still complains about the alphabet-centrism of characters sets early implemented on computer was detrimental to the culture and literature and history and whatever and blablabla of non-alphabetic cultures.
What does that have to teach to us?
1) positional is better
2) RISC is better
3) given an unlimited amount of time literates, humanists, philosophers and blabla-ers will not end up in agreeing upon a standard base for a working system, while matematicians and bankers will do it in no time.
4) consequently, the REAL problem for internationalization are literates, humanists, philosophers and blabla-ers.
/joke_(but not so much)_mode
Lol, that is pretty funny. You often get these when someone tries to copy and paste content from Word into their HTML editor.
Aston on February 6, 2010 10:25 PMThese are great! Here is one where you can get a bunch of design pattern stuff too - shirts, posters, etc.
http://www.cafepress.com/codergear
Jason McDonald on February 6, 2010 10:25 PMI might just have to get one of those. It's high on the geekiness scale, but I think almost everyone who's used a computer knows the dreaded white box.
Aaron G on February 6, 2010 10:25 PMJeff,
encoding stuff is pretty nasty sometimes, I constantly run into trouble with it too. But your problems with “special” characters like “, ” or — are probably due to not storing your files in UTF-8, because I just created a test feed and feedvalidator does not complain about these characters.
See here: a href="http://www.slashslash.de/feed.xml"http://www.slashslash.de/feed.xml/a
Most of the problems I had with encodings were due to the fact that you can set the XML encoding attribute or the charset attribute of the Content-Type header field to UTF-8, but as long as your files aren't actually STORED in UTF-8 by your editor (or your scripts on your server), it doesn't work. The reason that all ASCII works fine is, that it was made a subset of UTF-8 exactly for the reason of easy transition.
I think it's often a real pain to have all your tools use the enconding you want to use. And in some cases, it isn't even possible to tell what your editor is actually using or to change what it uses.
Simon on February 6, 2010 10:25 PMThe comments to this entry are closed.
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