I have no capslock and I must scream
memex.marginalia.nu
memex.marginalia.nu
"For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld."
This is very different to some other languages (e.g. Japanese is famous for it), where only a slight mispronounciation usually means nobody will understand what you're saying. I have encountered this many times, I pronounced a word just how I heard it and people were just giving me blank stares, only when I showed the spelled word did they get it. I never encountered this with English native speakers.
Meanwhile, Spanish, with its perfect phonetic spelling is spoken by a people who will go out of their way to understand you no matter how bad you speak their language.
My experience is that it’s mostly cultural, and often comes down to whether the person you’re speaking to has themself had to try using a foreign language, thus gaining the empathy to help you out.
My heart wasn't really in it, but I was also very discouraged by this.
Keyword: refuse. They can, but pretend they don’t. It’s racism disguising itself as cultural pride. (Source: I’m French and am certainly not proud of that part of my heritage)
It's elitism, France's hate of foreigners is not founded on skin colour or heritage (e.g. both your parents can be French and if your French is bad, you get treated poorly anyway).
But yes, elitism is also present: If you're perceived as French and your french is bad, you will also be treated poorly. But it's a different kind of "poorly". In fact, Paul Taylor talks about that in his stand up "Franglais" (I HIGHLY recommend a watch, it's hilarious especially if you're familiar with both French and British/American culture, and it's available for free on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pae2AMnmUVA)
I think another part is how much diversity there is in speakers of the language and the common dialects.
For example, there's a very large number of Spanish speakers worldwide with a very wide variety of accents and dialects, plus large numbers of non-native speakers. That also applies to English, but doesn't apply so much to French (not that there's zero variety, but compare the content of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dialects_and_varieties, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_English and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_French).
Because of all that linguistic variety, if you're an English or Spanish speaker you're generally more accustomed to hearing different pronunciations of your own language day to day than French speakers are (on average, YMMV, etc).
I lived in Romania at one point, where this was even more obvious. There are comparatively few distinct dialects of Romanian, and most Romanians have never heard non-native speakers speaking their language, so no matter how friendly they were, understanding unusual (OK, wrong) pronunciation was just not a common skill.
I think it's a mix of multiple reasons.
First, French is a language which not only has no word stress but actively blends words together when speacking in a sentence. Correct word pronunciation is key to understanding and what foreigners view as small errors sometimes do actually make their sentence unintelligible to a French speaker from France.
Then, language proficiency is a strong social marker in France. So, if you speak broken French, people will subconsciously view you as lower class/uneducated.
Oh dear. This is really not my experience. In the first couple of years I lived in the UK it was a huge pain making myself understood by the natives, until I finally managed to approximate the local accent. I was even very frustrated that nobody seemed to make an effort to meet me half-way, in my efforts to be understood. I would often have this experience, where I'd be speaking to someone and they'd stare at me with a blank face, seemingly just waiting for me to repeat myself in case they could understand me this time around.
Among non-native English speakers I think this experience is common. Conversely, I've been able to communicate just fine with non-native English speakers who had very thick accents and spoke only broken English, exactly because both parties in the conversation were patient and attentive.
In my Master's I had a tutor from Indonesia. For me he was like the best teacher ever and I felt he made everything crystal clear and helped me really understand some hairy concepts. Then I spoke to a British friend who complained she couldn't understand a word he was saying and she hated every minute of his class.
Sometimes I think native and non-native speakers of English really speak two different languages.
English spelling is also a "side channel" which persists information about the word which is lost (recoverable only via lookup) when spelling is normalized.
With things as they are, the etymology of words is often visible in their spelling; this has practical implications such as imparting shades of meaning through allusion, which are one reason English has retained lots of near-synonyms, but not discarded them. This means it allows for a particular kind of nuance.
As a native speaker of English I find the relative paucity of vocabulary confounding (or comical); it is now expected in my (bilingual) household that when where English draws distinctions, Spanish reuses. My German-speaking father in law is always entertaining us with cases where German constructs words through liberal compounding, where English doesn't.
Which is just to say, problems aside, English's maddening spelling almost always encodes useful information. For some uses. (Not tech docs, but more than poetry.)
Interesting footnote to this: English has many "backformations," cases where the spelling of some words has conformed over time to that of similar words from other languages, even when they etymologically unrelated. My favorite example of this is "strawberry" in which the "berry" is a backformation.
The words in English for meat and its sources are the go-to example.
The words for the animals, are from Anglo-Saxon. The words for the meat as you eat it, are from French.
Because England acquired its French from occupation c. 1066; the peasants knew the animals but it was the new French-speaking aristocracy were the ones that ate them.
A is /ei/ and lots of other sounds.
E is /i/, sometimes it's an open e, ..
I is /ai/, sometimes not, ...
O is always a diphthong, plain /o/ does not exist anymore
U is /a/, /ju/, ??
Y is there for the show, often it's used for /j/
English like German has lots and lots of vowels, while Latin and Italian have like, 7? The letters were supposed to have only one sound at most, but history clearly shows us that it's easier to reuse or adapt an existing letter than invent a new one (look at [ng] for instance, or [th] which became used mostly because nobody had types to print thorn and eth).
Old and Middle English were like that too, but then the Great Vowel Shift happened and now English still mostly retains the Middle English spelling with apparently random pronounciation rules.
Nobody devises a non-phonetic alphabet, when English adopted the Latin alphabet it was mostly phonetical. The issue is that the written language always moves slower than the spoken one, because written language lasts for longer.
Germany actually enacted an orthographical reform in 1996, where they modified the spelling of certain words to make the language easier to learn. This was remarkable in and of itself, since it involved an international agreement between multiple German-speaking countries. As I've been learning German, it's been a strange and pleasant feeling to hear a long word and then be able to spell it correctly 99% of the time.
Ironically, because of my parent comment above, Mark Twain also has an essay on how much he hated learning German [4] (more due to grammar than spelling, although he was learning it before the reform).
[1] https://spellingbee.com [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1... [4] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html
It's not a common word for me to use, but if I had been put in the situation where I had to use it in English, it's likely I'd use the Swedish spelling.
Languages which spell “phonetically” have to reform their spelling from time to time (and agree on whose pronunciation is authoritative) else the language ends up with the same issues as English and French. TANSTAAFL.
Personally I find the conservative spelling of English and French easier when reading as they often encode meaning which is stripped from “reformed” spelling such as German.
The alphabet was designed to be phonemic instead of phonetic for the exact reason you claim.
> While sometimes referred to as “phonetic” it is, in truth, phonemic, as Shaw wished. A phonetic alphabet would look quite different depending on the accent it represented. Shavian, on the other hand, does not purport to represent exactly sounds, but classes of sounds. A person from London, from New York and from Sydney all pronounce the AH sound differently, but each would recognise the sound when said by the others. In Shavian they would all write 𐑭 for this sound.[1]
I think the problem that you encountered is rather that there are certain dictionaries that spell words in a dialect that you don't use (think of how a British person says "past" vs an American person). But that is a different problem from what you described. You can very well use Shavian with any accent of English because it is designed that way.
An English person and only from the south of England at that. I’m English from Liverpool and I say past the same as y’all!
I’ve been in Texas 20 years and picked up y’all as a verbal tick same as well…y’all.
So, depending on your native accent, Shavian might still require you to use more than one letter for the same sound (and therefore have to remember which words use which), or use the same letter for multiple sounds. Or, at least, it will if you want to have standardized orthography.
Yes, some hard choices do need to be made. In cases like these, it’s almost always better to err on the side of preserving distinctions even if the speaker does not recognize the distinctions. Because over time, they will start to recognize patterns and understand the distinctions more while nothing of value is lost in English.
> Shavian might still require you to use more than one letter for the same sound (and therefore have to remember which words use which)
Yes and for the most part I think this is a good thing. It is a very small concession to make considering the alternative.
> Or, at least, it will if you want to have standardized orthography.
One single prescriptive spelling for global english may be impossible for the time being. But I am very interested in further researching a kind of neo-mid-atlantic accent.
But on a positive note, discovering all these small quirks are like "Achievement unlocked" kind of moments if you like learning languages.
You pronounced the "h" like in "hot"? (with the "h" making actually a sound?). I am quite surprised because we do not pronounce and "h" when it starts a word (usually at least), and I've been learning English in the 80's with Brian and Jenny (kudos to the ones who had the same manual) and it was not taught that way either.
ADDED: You do see a remnant of this with "an historical" but even that is generally not preferred in most dialects. https://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/drgw007.html Basically, it has to do with whether the initial "h" is pronounced in a given dialect of English.
e.g.
Hot Happy House Hotel Humble Hundred Help Hippo
https://yolainebodin.com/the-language-nook/english/english-w...
And then there's knight and knife :-O
I looked it up on wikipedia and of course it was "The Lord" XD
Sort of like a “where’s Waldo” only it’s “where’s the pronounced vowel”?
Hungarian spelling is super easy by comparison, but then the rest of Hungarian is not.
And American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford, which is the standard for world english. The oxford is far to large for any child to memorize.
The Oxford English Dictionary is nice, but it's a British reference, and wouldn't make sense as the source for an American spelling bee. A Brazilian spelling bee (if that makes sense) wouldn't use a Portugeuse reference from Portugal either.
Noah Webster literally codified, and partially invented, American spelling—whereas Oxford's dictionary is a symbol of traditional British spelling. It's patently ridiculous to suggest that US spelling contests use a British spelling reference.
The full Webster's (which is probably the closest to a standard for American English) is 263K entries (which Google tells me is what is used for the Scripp's spelling bee) vs. 350K for Oxford. So smaller but not that much smaller. The standard Webster's is "only" 75K but there's also a truncated version of Oxford that's 125K.
"Webster's New International Dictionary" contains "more than 600,000 entries" and it's a single volume, albeit a hefty one.
"Oxford English Dictionary" on the other hand, has "301,100 main entries" and yet the last paper version was 20 volumes. Presumably because OED contains more details per word.
Of course, for anything but a spelling bee it's pretty absurd to compare dictionaries by number of entries. Beyond a certain point: you're just buying more chaff like family names and alternative spellings.
But absolutely agree with your point. It's not like Britain and US vocabulary differs markedly in books and speaking.
> Supplementing the entry headwords, there are
> 157,000 bold-type combinations and derivatives;[8]
> 169,000 italicized-bold phrases and combinations;[9]
> 616,500 word-forms in total,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headword
> The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has around 273,000 headwords along with 220,000 lemmas [word, compound, phrase, or derivative],[2]
That reform has since been reformed twice itself, and major newspapers have started to enforce their own orthography to fight the chaos that was caused by these "improvements". Most people my age (40-something) and socioculutal strata have ignored the reform altogether and keep using the old, "correct" forms. And the kids may learn the "easier" form at first, but once they get immersed with books and the news, switch to weird variants somewhere between old-school and new-school German orthography, with a heavy bias to old-school.
[Citation Needed]
It’s not that I don’t believe, so (mainly because I find most new forms uglier), but outside my own writing (which the spellchecker then complains about, and I change it) I don’t really encounter "Photographie."
I never read about "Delfine" or "Spagetti", though.
You mean Austria and Switzerland. Their neighbours?
I might argue it was not so hard. Especially since Switzerland doesn't use ß
More German speaking countries (language with official status) who were not involved: Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, Namibia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin#/media/File:S%C...
Detecting cat pictures is nothing compared to deciphering sütterlin. Even Unicode has rejected it, despite accepting useless text like Linear A.
I think the scandinavian countries had similar changes, maybe sometimes a bit earlier.
For handwriting there had been going on a debate on whether to use Kurrent (Sütterlin is a Current) or Antiqua for centuries.
Hermann Hesse mandated for years that his German books still should be printed in Fraktur, until at one point someone convinced him that young people would not pick them up anymore.
Overall German orthography never quite recovered from the switch to Antiqua, because the sz ligature in Fraktur was not directly mapped to "sz" in Antiqua instead the letter ß was introduced, but the Swiss used French typewriters so they use "ss" instead.
:|
However we have some letters that - while phonetically the same - are used in different cases.
'u' and 'ó', or 'rz' and 'ż', or 'h' and 'ch'
Those are largely result of a Slavic country adapting Latin alphabet and over millennia trying to reconcile the two (clashing systems). The notations and pronunciations evolved slowly over the years and aforementioned are the remaining artifacts of the past.
In primary and secondary schools you'd get orthography test when teachers dictates some silly story riddled with unusual, rare trap words where you 'guess' those interchangeable letters.
(gżegżółka, or maybe: gżegrzółka, grzegżółka, grzegrzułka...)
There was a push for a similar reform to sort this out but went nowhere. Partially due to tradition and partially that there would be clashes like
'może' - maybe, 'morze' - sea
Both are pronounced the same, so if you drop 'rz' both words would have the same spelling.
There was only one way to write down a heard word, and only one way to read a written word (minus possibly intonation/accents that cannot be captured either way). So while I disagree with some of the specific choices in the joke story (and they possibly inadvertently have some deal breaking inconsistencies, especially around the reformed i) dear gawd yes, we can simplify this nightmare that English calls spelling :O
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/corpse-corps-horse-an...
1. http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/iorz-feixfuli-m-j-yilz....
2. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/twain/mark/what_is_man/chap...
Comstock's phonetic magazine (1846)
https://archive.org/details/comstocksphoneti00unse
Biografiz ov de prezidents ov de Yunited Stats, kompild bi F.G. Adamz (1856)
https://archive.org/details/biografizovdepre00adam
A system of phonetic spelling, adapted to English (1889)
https://archive.org/details/systemofphonetic00call
The fonetic primer, offering the universal alfabet and the science of spelling (c1907)
https://archive.org/details/foneticprimeroff00storrich
More here:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Spelling+r...
It’s interesting to think about why the proposals for English failed while orthographic reforms in some other languages—Russian, German, Japanese, Chinese—succeeded, at least partially.
Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board
Here is the original Quikscript Manual:
https://www.quikscript.net/quikscript-manual.pdf
Quikscript evolved from Shavian:
>[George Bernard] Shaw placed in his will provisions instructing his executor to organize a world-wide competition to design an improved English alphabet. A British designer, Ronald Kingsley Read, who had corresponded extensively with Shaw for several years regarding just such an alphabet, was selected along with three other finalists as the winners of the competition. Read was chosen to design the final form of the alphabet. The "Shaw Alphabet" or "Shavian", as it is now generally known, was the result.
One quick thought is that Quickscript merged together a couple of letters that are similar. It merged "err" and "array" and it also merged "ago" and "up". Merging err-array is probably fine, but in Shavian, "up" is stressed while "ago" is not. So a little something is lost in the up-ago merger.
[1]: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20090-quikscript-shavian.pd...
A new alphabet (like Hangul), could take a long time to adopt fully though, and there’s nothing wrong with that imo.
The cost I'm talking about is losing the ability to read the vast amount of text that has been already written in the current alphabet. For the Latin alphabet in particular, which is by far the most used writing system in history, losing access to all text produced anywhere in Europe, the Americas and most of Africa for the last few hundred years or so would be very hard to make up for.
Also somewhat related, in the same timeframe, Japan was opening itself up after nearly three centuries of isolation and catching up with technological development. While new loanwords flooded into the language from all kinds of European languages, some scholars argued for replacing the traditional Japanese writing system with the Latin alphabet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#As_a_...
The proposal never won any majority support, but the government did end up doing a smaller reform: After WW2, several character forms were simplified and an official list of characters in common use with standardized pronounciations was published by the government as a baseline for the school syllabus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjitai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji
I think one reason is that phonetic spellings wouldn't work with some regional dialects. Consider 'bath' - many southern English people pronounce it as if it had an 'r'.
(Note: Japanese uses a phonetic alphabet. For the most part, the characters you see (when kanji is written out in hiragana/katakana) are sounded exactly as they are in when written/spoken individually/independently. There are some dialects though that modify this, notably Tokyo's replacing "su" with "s" and other changes)
For example, Romanian is a pretty phonetic langauge, and it adds 4 letters/diacritics to the latin alphabet to come closer - ă [uh], î (no equivalent in English), ș [sh], and ț (like [zz] in pizza).
Even so, it also has some letter combinations - ce sound like the [chai] in "chair", ci sounds like the [Chi] in "China"; but c in any other place represens a hard [k] sound. To mark a hard [k] before e or i, you then use che,chi (why they didnt do it the other way around is beyond me, since [ca],[cu],[co],[că],[cî] all spell the same [c] sound as [che], [chi]).
The same rules apply to g - ghi sounds like the [gea] in gear, while gi sounds like the [gi] in gin.
X of course represents [ks], but can also reprezent [gz] in certain words, such as examen (exam).
I is normally a particular vowel or semivowel sound, like [ee] in English. However, in word final positions after a consonant, it's usually a consonantic sound. For example, the word "mări" (seas) is pronounced as a single syllable, with just a short [ee] sound at the end. However, the word "{a} mări" ({to} enlarge) is pronounced in two syllables, [muh-ree], accenting the second syllable.
The personal pronouns I, he, and she (eu, el, ea) are all written with an e at the start, but always pronounced with an extra [ee] sound. The phonetic spelling would have been ieu, iel, iea but for whatever reason this was not done. No other words share this feature in the standard accent, though it happens to many/all words starting with the letter e- in other accents.
As with many other languages, borrowed words tend to preserve the original spelling, even after they settle on a Romanian pronunciation. For example, the word "weekend" is written exactly like this, not the Romanian phonetic spelling "uichend". Older borrows do get this treatment though. For example the French "chaise longue", a reclining chair, was borrowed into Romanian a long time ago and is now spelled "șezlong".
Also - English was never consistent. The thorn/eth split was completely random and was down more to style than correctness. Modern spelling of Old English has standardised the spelling. But macrons and dots over g's and c's also never existed, but are common in modern spelling for OE.
You can't resolve the vowel distribution by remapping it, so keep some vouwels in the woerld…
Otherwise look good / ok'ish to me. (no /s)
I really like the gud trend by streamers to overpronounce words so they match their spelling again, e.g. say of-ten for often etc.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
Besides that, though, I don't like the Shields proposal because it's specific to his dialect. No "r" in "letez" and using an "a" in "jast" for instance makes this difficult for me to read.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1687635
(Speaking as someone whose native language is non-Latin-based, I think it was a very bad idea. Worse still is their attitude that if some website becomes unusable, "just file a bug".)
Mozilla is run by one of the most inept group of designers, who seem committed to killing off the last non-Chrome browser.
You know what feature they need to remove? Telemetry.
Their telemetry must show that practically zero of their users actually use the collected telemetry, and Mozilla itself can't seem to avoid using the "data" to make bad decisions.
Safari is still huge.
My previous point was that a walled garden being "huge" offers no benefit for the vast majority of people outside of the walled garden. How does this not apply to these arguments according to you? Because if they do, and I claim they do, then that reinforces my other statement that talking about walled gardens being huge is completely missing the point.
The presence of a proprietary web browser that only works on a specific platform restricted to a certain class of individuals which can afford to be on that platform doesn't really add much to the competition.
> another reason might be handing Google de-facto control over standards
I don't see Apple having that control to be any better although from what I've been reading about web browser engines and the underlying technology, I doubt anyone else, besides a few behemoth tech companies, can take any sort of control. The web is too far gone for that.
Overall, yes it is still a major player (20%) but notably almost all of that is on mobile where it's 27% of users worldwide (presumably in large part because of the iOS browser ban).
On desktop meanwhile, Safari is now below 10%, slowly but steadily declining, and it looks like to be overtaken by both Edge and Firefox within the next year or two. Bad news for Safari, but honestly surprisingly good news for Firefox. Edge's success is promising for the web too imo, if it gives Google less influence over Chromium.
> Safari is still huge.
Sorry, I meant to say WebKit-based.
Edit: On second thought, how can you even attempt to use telemetry to justify feature removal when a sizable portion of your userbase disables telemetry?
If you are up for a second serving of irony, comments for that bug are restricted because someone tried to incite the HN mob onto it a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30379655
https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/36-localized-programming-lan...
We all draw different lines for what feature is not common yet not rare enough to remove, so the context always matters.
For this subject of character encodings, browsers have already reduced their repertoire of suppported encodings for a good chunk of the last decade: the Encoding Standard [1] is substantially smaller than what it used to be (I know because I did implement all of them back then). Some of them (e.g. UTF-7, not exactly "removed" from the Standard because it was never added AFAIK) caused security issues but others (e.g. HZ) didn't and only got removed by the lack of usage. This kind of decision, either for or against, can be only backed with telemetry-like quantification anyway. No criticism in the issue was based on the concrete evidence; Henri Sivonen is right to say that he "can't address remaining non-Latin problems without seeing concrete examples that need addressing".
Wow, this is exactly what happened to me (probably between 8 and 10). I had an old 286 computer, where I learnt BASIC by reading programs already available on the computer.
I wrote programs, but had no idea what the keywords meant. I remember reading out loud "IF … THEN … ELSE" that I pronounced "if … ten … elsse", and my father in the room corrected my pronunciation, "it's if … then … else".
I was very surprised, because he didn't know BASIC at all. "How do you know this?" "It's how we pronounced it in English. It means 'si … alors … sinon'." o_o
It was a revelation to me: the "keywords" I typed in BASIC programs were not just meaningless tokens for the BASIC language, they came from English and had a meaning outside BASIC.
> Notice: "String" and "Thread" are the same thing to non-computing people. #True #Programming
Note that they are not actually removing any encodings themselves, so the argument from security / attack surface doesn't arise: the website can still send text in any of those encodings (or malformed but autodetected as such). This is purely about UX.
No. If the visitor is able to freely choose the page encoding, then the attacker can lure one into doing so by presenting a seemingly malformed partial text. So it will allow the attacker to control the victim page's encoding, only less effectively though.
---
I'm also very annoyed about the disproportional amount of criticism received by Firefox compared to Chrome here, because Chrome has proactively removed the encoding selection UI well before Firefox tried to do similar. And---to elaborate what I referred to the "telemetry-like quantification" before---Firefox concluded that the UI can't be completely removed without breaking a lot of existing pages using the telemetry [1], hence this "Repair Text Encoding" feature. It is hopelessly absurd to blame Firefox alone for this issue.
The good thing is that we have Vivaldi, Opera's spiritual successor in many things including this one: if somebody needs a knob, it'll be there.
Bad in principle or bad because you've personally encountered pages where the menu item doesn't work but macOS Safari's submenu does?
> "just file a bug".
It's not just "a bug", it's "a low priority bug" - it's a polite way to say "I couldn't care less".
[NSFW - contains graphic descriptions of torture and other severe violence]
https://wjccschools.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/01/I...
But in reality it's just a common short-hand content warning, similar to [PDF] right before a URL that ends in .pdf.
> When AM had altered Benny, during the machine's utterly irrational, hysterical phase, it was not merely Benny's face the computer had made like a giant ape's. He was big in the privates; she loved that! She serviced us, as a matter of course, but she loved it from him. Oh Ellen, pedestal Ellen, pristine-pure Ellen; oh Ellen the clean! Scum filth.
But I'm sure you know all of that. The warning is not for you personally, you may disregard it.
I think the two most common definitions I have seen are "negligible senescence" (e.g. Elves in Tolkien) and "cannot die in any way" (e.g. some religion's understanding on the concept of an immortal soul). The latter is fairly common and matches "cannot ever die even if you want to."
And than read this headline. Enough internet for me today.
I do not understand why designers are so insistent on making tools so difficult and unpleasant to use.
1) Visual changes show better than feature lists. I'm not convinced this matters anywhere near as much for customers as marketing folks seem to think it does, but marketing values it regardless, management values it (it'll show better to their bosses, too), and product managers, designers, and front-end developers value it (so they have nice-looking things for portfolios and presentations, both internal and external)
2) Making something that looks good in a screenshot or demo is not the same thing as making something that works well (that is, has "good UX"), and making something that does both well is hard enough that the talent (and environment/budget) to do it may be fairly rare. The former matters to those concerned about point 1, so that's what gets priority (which is why so many redesigns are neutral, at best, as far as UX, and many are worse).
3) If design is done well, it's heavily cyclical. Design guidelines and languages and component libraries and such should be built up such that most design work only happens when there are initial designs, very large feature add-ons that break with what the previous design guidelines can accommodate, or redesigns. So, if you're a designer and want to stay comfortably employed, and you're a manager who doesn't want to surrender head-count or lose your people to other projects, and a large part of the org has various incentives to push initiatives that result in something nice to to look at (see 1, again) what happens? Lots more redesigns than need to happen. LOTS more.
[EDIT] And all this is before we even consider possible business reasons to deliberately make the product worse, which are also A Thing.
This might be true from a bottom-line perspective, but the marketing/product/engagement manager's targets (whether company-mandated or personally-mandated to use them as resume bullet points) may still hinge on increasing "engagement".
Recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things
EG, you're building a bridge. It needs to do its job, and not collapse. There are many perfectly functional designs, which have appealing form. Yet, if you want to actually be able to use the beast, it:
- needs to be wide enough to pass traffic, but not too wide (waste of money)
- needs to be able to keep the traffic from careening off into the abyss each use
- needs 100 other things such as the above
But once the above "functional" criteria are met, form is fine. Why not make it look good? Great! Yet, don't (as an example) overlay form which then reflects sunlight into driver's eyes, so they can't see and crash on the bridge.
This is all reasonably understood with normal day objects.
But, when someone engineers a bridge, they have to go to a decade of schooling + years on the job, to rise to that position. And the same for people designing beautiful buildings, or homes. They know the restrictions, the load requirements, and then they layer extra on top of that.
Not even sure what I'm fully rambling on here about, except I guess that I think UX/UI should only be attempted after years of using software in a professional capacity.
I was in to a store the other day, and they were looking up stock. It was an ncurses display. And the employee was zooming through it, as typical, with keyboard shortcuts, and FAST.
UX/UI is really the problem. Making things pretty gets in the way of functional first. Keep it function before form, and you're fine.
And if anyone rattles on about Apple and Steve Jobs, from what I've read, heard, and watched? He was 100% about "function first!". He'd go ballistic if simple functionality was hard to get at, or missing, or buggy, or incomprehensible.
Yup, he wanted form to look good. But that came on top of proper, perfect function.
Which is its own beauty.
Having done research into UI/interaction design, I can confirm that all research in this area prioritizes things that (a) can be measured quickly and (b) with a high degree of confidence.
Good luck running a controlled experiment where multiple folks use an interface for an entire week and then become power-users of the system!
The modern web disgusts and enrages me more often than not.
talking to the user instead of taking the decision made by some investor/suit in a larger, less efficient firm.
I understand this 100%. Youtube is the same exact thing - the home page is total garbage unless you enjoy watching the same 8 videos you just watched. But we're in a thread about bad UI/UX, so I'm going to complain that the "default" being bad is a bad thing.
[1]: FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom... Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...
Now, if they could just make the windshield wiper controls all work the same direction...
I've never tried to test it cause I don't like horribly expensive mechanical noises, but yeah.
FWIW, 25 years ago, I had some generic assignment when I was student, I don't remember the exact details, but I made it on auto-windshield wiping tech, and what I found was that multiple patents already existed back then (one from Mercedes or BMW, I don't remember which ; it might have been both). I'm mystified that we aren't seeing those everywhere yet.
The new tech these days is to spray fluid out of the wipers themselves. The blades have a lot of holes laser cut into them, as the blades move across the windshield they spray fluid just an inch ahead of the blade. It's starting to become very common in the luxury car brands, even the lower tier Lexueses and BMWs are getting them as the newer gen cars are released.
It doesn't sound particularly cool, but when you try using them it is a very nice feature to have.
It was interesting but I didn't find it especially better. They moved away from this and the later models just have normal sprayers. Maybe the very latest have that again, I don't know.
Isn’t this a solved problem and completely standard on most new cars for a few years now?
Some work better than others, but most of the time when they don't work well it's because the wipers are worn and need to be replaced.
Automakers also equip automatic transmission cars with paddle shifters, which really give you no tactile feedback to let you know what gear you're in. They also make it difficult to shift while turning. A traditional manual with the HH shift pattern gives you that feedback that allows you to know what gear you're in and doesn't limit your ability to shift while turning.
Pros of touchscreens:
- You can make the UI look like anything you want.
Cons of touchscreens:
- You can make the UI look like anything you want.
i.e. I don't mind touchscreen A/C controls or something, provided the driver's wheel also has those controls (which in my old Toyota Prius it does).
IMO the big innovation is making sure that everything I would want to do while driving is literally at my fingertips, which should be on the steering wheel.
being able to turn the heater or defrosters on without looking is a pretty big upside when driving.
tesla changing where that is in updates and making you look for it in a new design just makes a bad problem worse
There was extensive discussion about that on here a short while ago:
Actually being able to customise it yourself (and have the changes persist long-term) wouldn't be that bad.
I don’t like that on my computer and definitely don’t want it in my car. It’s bad enough when you buy a new car and things have been “improved”.
Aftermarket steering wheels are widely available for road cars. Most of them are wheel shaped.
https://www.consumerreports.org/video/view/cars/news/6272879...
The steering wheel is already motion controlled.
It was basically this.
This means that the app will work amazing and without thought ("it just works!") for 80% of the population but will be non-functional for the 20% of the population which includes power users and users who would have been willing to go through the initial learning curve for a more powerful app.
Just to note: I'm not deriding the "lowest common denominators" as I am definitely one for some domains. For example, I chose the app with the simplest deisgn for doing my taxes as I didn't want to spend time learning about taxes.
what if they're actually designing systems and schemes which use you? (in soviet russia ---and the modern day internet--- computer uses YOU)
I started trying to make a joke but now I'm not laughing :|
For personal use, I find 1Password typically handles multiple screen logins, including 2FA quite well, although requires an extra UI interaction.
Let's remove all indications that buttons are buttons!
I've actually had to use a site which had all four combinations: static text that looks like static text, static text that looks like a button, buttons that look like static text, and buttons that look like buttons.
Because they need something to pad their resume. In fact, most of the things that are wrong with software today are for the same reason.
Executives want to make bold changes, so the Start button must be "re-imagined." For the same reason, Product Managers "re-imagine" the menus that have been in place for years and Product Designers "re-imagine" the design language to remove all cues that a button clicks and a panel scrolls.
In my routine trips to the auto parts stores over the past 20 years, I have seen their throughput drop as more and more of these modern ideas seeped in. Their text menus had been the same for decades, with as many options for a next action as there were keys on the keyboard. If my intuition is correct, they were remote sessions to a server/mainframe. How about that for keeping the computation close to the data. Now that has all been replaced with a single button and a cursor.
I'm not a die-hard CLI user by any stretch, but I understand the impulse after watching usability circle the drain year after year. There's a healthy middle somewhere and I am hoping to find it.
I think one interesting way to look at these sort of changes is analogous to the introduction of new features in code. In the short term, new features can be added to the existing codebase without the need for much change, but eventually, the overhead becomes problematic and there is the need to make more structural adjustments.
I think it’s similar for designers, who get to the point where new features don’t have a natural home in the existing interface and want to make changes. Just as a junior developer might be tempted to rewrite from scratch, a junior designer might be tempted to introduce a new mental model and rearrange everything. In some cases this may be OK but generally you need a more nuanced approach. The fact that users are the consumers of the change, not designers, is where the analogy falls apart, and thus the need for a more thoughtful introduction of any change.
Obviously the abrupt changes are those that cause a negative reaction, especially when combined with the exaggerated desire to clean up an interface. However, not all change is for changes sake. Sometimes it’s just a case of trying to respond to constraints and make the best compromise when dealing with changing software.
Underlying this fallacy is the assumption that usage should somehow be uniformly distributed across all features. In reality, a power law distribution is more natural.
The Caps Lock key makes no sense in the context of a computer keyboard. Back in the days of typewriters when everything was a single monospaced font, typing in all caps was the only way to make something bold (there weren’t italics, bold, font sizes or different fonts). Having a convenient way to hold down the shift key was nice in this context. In the context of a computer keyboard that has multiple fonts, sizes and weights, it is a dumb key. Larry Tesler’s dictum “no modes” is immediately applicable. Steve Jobs tried to get rid of the caps lock key twice (once at Apple and once at Next). Google’s pixel books have replaced it with a search shortcut, which is not that useful but much better than having a key whose primary function is to mess up password entry and shout online without any extra effort for shouting. On a Mac keyboard there are a few common substitutions for caps lock that you can use. Any of these substitutions are preferable (I have it as Option for tab navigation but any of the other main hot keys make a better use of keyboard real estate).
Props to Apple, which in 2022 still provides an easy option to remap caps more or less straight in the keyboard configuration. And actually provides that even on iOS (which I was stoked to discover), though the remapping options are limited.
And boo to microsoft, the only significant OS where that’s not a native option, you need the powertoys and in my experience it’s quite unreliable: regularly capslock will revert and you have to go into the ‘toys and flip it off and on again.
I’ve never looked but I guess it’s some sort of registry setting which every update resets, without the ‘toys being aware of the info?
You press shift once and then the next key you press is capitalized (or a symbol or whatever).
And if you think "well, just keep shift pressed and use another finger to type what you would have typed with your pinky" it just means you're either not touch typing or doing it "wrong" :) There's a reason there are two shift keys on a keyboard, yet I rarely hear people complaining about this but plenty complain about the "useless" caps lock.
TL;DR: you can pry caps lock from my cold dead hands. I need it.
(ETA: maybe I should just remap double-shift to caps and be done with it, but that's just one more thing I have to learn and one more configuration I need to do on a new machine).
What surprises me are people who consider a certain key "useless" simply because they don't use it, so it should be removed/reassigned. And there's plenty of them in this thread who think that I'm doing it wrong by using the key for the exact job it was meant for.
Thinking of it, with modern messaging apps that support text formatting, it would be useful to have dedicated caps-lock-style keys for bold, italic, monospace, etc.
The value of capslock is that it provides an essentially blank key which can be remapped to something useful e.g. Ctrl, Esc, Meta, …
Exactly as the article mentions, caps lock is a nice to have, though rare, key. Removing or remapping it will complicate your typing in those scenarios for sure. if you find a better use for that space where it simplifies other more common scenarios, great. But just removing it would be idiotic.
They’re not, unless by “good keyboard” you mean “custom layout”. On all the keyboards I’ve ever known, the almost entirely useless capslock takes one of the more valuable places on the keyboard just left of the home row. It’s the modifier key which requires the least movement by far, yet with a native function which is almost entirely worthless.
I’d like to see your hypothetical keyboard where control (to say nothing of esc) is anywhere near as easy to reach, despite both being used significantly more than caps, and caps being trivially and fully dispensable with unless your days are spent writing SQL with all keywords in all caps.
> You could argue for mapping caps lock to Super or Hyper if you're an emacs user maybe
No, you really could not, unless you’re part of the minority which flies with fully custom keybindings. But even then control is such a central modifier of emacs that making it more accessible and require less contorsion tends to yield the highest bang for your buck.
You could always remap the old control to super or hyper instead of having two control keys I guess.
With multi-function keys (as supported by e.g. QMK-powered keyboards, or software like kmonad) allows adding multiple functions to a key.
e.g. "tap-hold": "tap CapsLock key sends 'Escape', hold CapsLock key sends 'Ctrl'" would be useful for someone who uses Vim and/or Emacs.
Taking 'tap-hold' a bit further, you can try putting the modifiers (which are only useful when held) under the home row keys: putting Alt, Gui, Ctrl, Shift underneath ASDF, (and reverse: Shift, Ctrl, Gui, Alt underneath JKL;). -- So called "home row modifiers".
The advantage is not needing to move the hand, and not needing to use the weaker pinky finger. Although, it can take some getting used to.
It's true that Esc is nowhere near as easy to reach, so if I used vim I'm sure I'd like to switch them (alt/meta is also easy to reach for me, so I never felt the need to use Esc for Meta in Emacs; and having two Alt keys anyway makes it better).
[0] https://img-prod-cms-rt-microsoft-com.akamaized.net/cms/api/... (using just this picture of the layout so this doesn't come off as some advertisement)
To be fair, on some keyboards, including the one I use, it's easy to reach both the right and left shift keys, so it's easy to alternate shift keys as needed to avoid using other fingers or moving your hand from the home row.
It's probably fairly obvious what I think about the taught-at-school touch typing method. It's a decent middle-of-the-road option that's intended to be easy to teach and to work for most people in most situations; that's all.
FWIW, "Caps Lock" is modal.
e.g. the Wikipedia page lists "Caps Lock" as a common example of mode errors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(user_interface)#Mode_err...
(No vim = not worrying about insert/normal mode; no capslock = no worrying about if tapping 'a' gives 'A' or 'a').
Why is the constant screaming at me? Why is the fact that it's a constant important enough to be encoded in the styling of the letters, but not important enough to be encoded in the name. Why isn't the IDE or the compiler keeping track of the constantness of the variable and reminding me to not do the wrong thing? If they can and are, why am I not trusting them? And if they can't, why am I writing in a language that doesn't even have JavaScript levels of a type system?
i always wondered why soft-BOL is set to such a difficult key to press (^) when it's such a useful movement.
QMK supports as much as 4 different behaviors per key: - tap - hold - tap-hold - double tap
And you can also set keys to change the layer each with their own behavior for caps lock.
Remapped to <Compose>, the Caps-Lock key is essential for someone who writes in many different languages. Removing it would not make me very happy.
That being said: I'd love someone to build a modern, USB/Bluetooth-enabled variant of the old Space-Cadet keyboard [1]. Would pay good money for it, too.
That said, I acknowledge that you have your own prefered way, and that’s how it should be. As it also should be that these extra keys exist at least on bigger laptops, if not on ultraportables.
Also, the right Alt and Ctrl are quick to go. But somehow there are always buttons for the windows and pop-up keys.
Some laptops manufacturers on my country also think it's a good idea to remove the forward slash and quotation mark. That's because it's the 105° key, and they can't reuse the US 104 keys standard they got from abroad, but well, somehow they think it's not a problem at all.
On the other direction, it's a good thing that desktop keyboards stopped including a "power my computer down" button where most keyboards have delete.
Some people can not understand how standards bring value.
Also, revolutionary != new. Apple rarely is the first to enter a new market.
If you wanted to compare the N900 to an iPhone, that might be a slightly more apt comparison, but at the end of the day, the iPhone and iPad completely changed what "phones" and "tablets" look like. Their predecessors and successors are extremely different devices and perform different functions.
To qoute Wikipedia: "The N900 functions as a mobile Internet device, and includes email, web browsing and access to online services, a 5-megapixel digital camera for still or video photography, a portable media player for music and video, calculator, games console and word processor, SMS, as well as mobile telephony using either a mobile network or VoIP via Internet (mobile or Wi-Fi)."
It has a resistive touch screen, which massively hampers what you can do on the device. This precludes it from any real gaming, or interactivity. By the time the N900 came out, the Apple App Store had 100k apps and 2 billion downloads. That's two magnitudes larger than the number of apps Maemo had in total.
It's not a matter of "a different form factor" it's more that the N900 is a completely different class of device, it fundamentally can't compete with the iPhone and its massive (even at the time) ecosystem.
If you were to squint with glasses of a completely different prescription to yours, sure, you can say they "do similar functions", but let's be honest with ourselves. The N900 was too little too late. It was released at a point in time when capacitive, glass touchscreens with high interactivity games and apps are what was the new norm.
I don't have an iPad, but I do have a Kindle Fire HD10, and I have to begrudgingly admit that I like it a lot more than I thought I would.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/apple-developing-fol...
I know it is the frequency illusion, but 2022 seems to ve the year that satire keeps coming true.
Counterpoint though, it didn't work out for Apple's touch bar.
And of course you don't evaluate an experiment to remove an option like in the story, by looking at before/after rates on how often the option is triggered. It's e.g. pretty clearly not what happened in the the Firefox encoding menu example that motivated the rant.
Should accessibility options go away as well because few users use it?
The underlying point (even if not conveyed through the best analogy) is that there are critical features that must exist regardless of what telemetry says.
Anyway, the point is more subtle than that. Whether a feature is used is as much a function of the overall design as much as the feature's usefulness. If you hide a feature away or make it awkward to access, then it will see less use. Sometimes an infrequently used feature can aid a more frequently used feature to work more smoothly.
I use F2 and F6 and screen contrast buttons every single day. And the FN lock is used just infrequently enough that there is ZERO possiblity I will remember its state at any given moment, especially considering reboots or sleeps that may toggle it. And I use it just enough that it isn't worth spending 5 seconds to move my hands away to figure out its state, consequently every single time I hit an FN key I get an undesired result from pressing it. For the love of god we are talking about adding 12 keys to the keyboard, they can be half-height, or simply making the FN lock into a shift function with no lock capability to GUARANTEE determinist results when pressing a key and the lock is in an unknown state. Can we please start a petition.
I've honestly never used this in my life. Can't your problem be solved by simply never engaging the Fn lock?
Actually, the keyboard layout looks pretty odd in general. I could forgive the Insert key (maybe there actually exist people who use it), but is there anyone who needs dedicated Scroll Lock and Pause keys?
edit: actually, I guess Excel power users might use Scroll Lock? It still looks like a pretty odd layout to me regardless.
Scroll lock usually only is important if used for something specific in a specific app. And pause, yeah, has fallen out of use. But it is mostly that laptops are now so common companies avoid assigning functions to keys no one has.
Home, End, PgUp and PgDn can be accessed on most (all?) compact keyboards as Fn+Left, Fn+Right, Fn+Up and Fn+Down. I use those very frequently, to me they're actually more convenient than dedicated keys (because Fn is near Ctrl, Alt and Shift, which are also used for cursor manipulation).
I personally don't care for large ('inverted T') arrow keys, but there are certainly laptops (e.g. Lenovo's ThinkPad line) that offer large arrow keys if that's something you desire.
And even back in the '80s there existed various keyboard layouts (PC, Macintosh, Sun).
I discovered the joys of control-in-place-of-caps-lock when I bought an HHKB, but I got it because I liked it as a keyboard. Since then I've had no trouble converting caps-lock into control with other keyboards.
If you don't mind an unrelated anecdote, while I got used to the diamond-shaped arrow keys of the HHKB, I kind of wish they would have been hjkl or just on the keyboard itself. I find that I still need to use arrow keys too much for that layout to be comfortable.
Really it boils down to the fact that I dislike the capslock key taking up valuable real estate. From my perspective has no real use, I never type more than the odd word in caps. I want to reward companies who omit it in the hope more will follow.
I use vim so hjkl are natural to me, but I got used to the diamond in short order and don't have any issues switching between them.
Let's hope not, I really like my comfortable ectra escape key. The pictures I saw when quickly searching for HHKB looked incomplete to me, control is fine in the corner!
Hopefully we'll have all options though, a comfortable keyboard is a must.
Was typing of upcase a common thing in the past? So common make it warranted a key for just that? I have no idea.
I suppose the development of the capslock key has more to do with much older typewriters. Mechanical typewriters took a fair amount of effort to use.
[1] https://github.com/dkter/aaaaa [2] https://github.com/dkter/aaaaa/pull/13
*(Not counting remapping the physical button to some other, useful, function).
(This is a genuine question, because I’m confused why one wouldn’t do it that way—I think it probably never even occurred to me to use Caps Lock for such a purpose, given that the modeless Shift key was right there.)
Removing the CapsLock key would piss off a lot of people in the hardware engineering world.
Normally I would just lock shift (sticky keys rock), but '.' happens in realm names, and shifting it isn't useful, so I use capslock for that.
That's about the only time I use capslock. Otherwise it's sticky keys all the way.
“Execute this SQL against the ‘XYZ_DB’ PostgreSQL database.”
“When I requested the HTML file over HTTP, I saw a CAPTCHA.”
As a side note I noticed that some keyboards implement CapsLock wrong: when CapsLock is on, pressing "9" should generate "9" and not ")". Otherwise it would be called ShiftLock, which is a lot less useful.
On the face of it, foldable screens seem awesome. Like the future. Only problem is that they are still the future.
Originally, I remapped the keys this way due to my macbook's touchbar that removed a functional escape key. The frequency is far higher for me to use escape than capslock, which I realized that I actually never used. When I need capitalization, I use the shift key.
(Both SR and DDD.)
Would you wish for you gas car engine to have kept a cranking port, as after all the battery could die and it’s more options that plugging a booster, right ?
I curse the person who put the by-far least useful function on one of the most accessible keys, and bunged Ctrl down where it is out of easy reach. A pox on them!
On Safari this is mangled until I force the encoding to Western (ISO Latin 1) - Chrome and Firefox leave it as is.
This is not futuristic, but actually retro. Some older computers (i.e. Sinclair ZX Spectrum) didn't have a power button at all.
Why? It removes the need to move your right hand off the mouse if you need to delete anything.
For example: double click a word and backspace with left hand. Especially handy for programming. Definitely one i can't live without now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/sxaxe0...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/sf5hot...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/sb5jf4...
I mean look, if you believe in abstractions at all, then sometimes (or always) interfaces need to hide things. Interfaces can be made too small for sure, but without a more principled argument on why any particular change is going too far, it seems way too easy to say "oh no someone made an interface smaller, the end is nigh!"
Though to be fair I guess the author's point is maybe that the arguments in the bug report are also insufficient if they could also be used to remove critical components. I'm not sure how much I agree with that, but I only glanced at the actual bug report.
I went with Apple’s “international” layout just to have more keys to map.
I'd remove Insert key. I regularly hit it by accident and I see no reason for insert-mode to exist except to annoy me.
So, like my beloved C64 then? I'm all for it.
It must always be there for service and safety.
Where is my context menu key? Why Fn+F4 doesn't suspend the machine anymore. Who regrouped the keys in this bad layout (Six Row Disaster). Somebody didn't understand the difference between clean design and useful design?
a aaa aaaaaa aa aaaaaaa aaa aaaaa aaaaaaaaaaa aaa
(PS. I read this in gemini. Thank you!)
I haven't used the caps-lock since then. Pinky just goes on the shift key TO TYPE ALL SHOUTY. I don't really know if pinky ever gets used fro letters in any case, but I think he doesn't so unless you need capital ctrl- something what's the problem?
Still it does also feel like the problem of designers that like to use the tail to wag the dog to justify yet another unnecessary change is just all too realistic.
Do you just hate seeing the caps lock key?
Wouldn’t it be easier just not to use it? If your problem is accidentally tapping it, wouldn’t that still happen with the key pried off?
And that gives you 1 billion combinations, sure most of them are garbage but still.
http://fuse.rupy.se uses it to test it...
6-bit would only give you 5 character names but with 0-9 and A-Z if you wished (although that is really confusing for names...)
On MacOS if I remap a key, it gets remapped for everything. I suppose the remapping is done before applications get the keystroke. Even if I connect to a remote computer, it’s getting the remapped keystroke.
On Linux, it’s just locally. On a remote system, the original keystroke is passed. The only way to get around that is with a programmable keyboard. But then your laptop keyboard doesn’t work the way you expect.
Let me introduce you to SysRq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_request
Even on big things that have had hundreds of developers it is never considered. Try hitting the pause button while watching a video on YouTube for example. Nothing happens. Try hitting it in any major video game. There are a scant handful that recognise it. It is a forgotten key.
I think this goes to show that lots of data-driven processes are anything but - the data is amoral and does what you tell it to do - or finally confesses after enough torture.
Telemetry says feature isn't used hardly at all? Means we need to promote this feature (in the case of ads, perhaps)! Or it could mean we can remove it entirely, in the case of Mozilla.
In the end it's just used to confirm what we wanted to do anyway.
The article is not really about the caps lock key. It's about stupid "data-driven" design.
Science has known this for a long time. Designers seem intent on having to rediscover this on their own.
Can it be disabled on windows?
The article is not really about the caps lock key.
Keyboard Manager in Microsoft PowerToys is probably the most straightforward.