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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately your comment is a sign of just how far we have left to go to get rid of the notion that computers are for use by English speakers primarily, and the rest of the world is an afterthought at best.

On 99% of the keyboards I've seen in my life, the middle row reads like this: ASDFGHJKLÖÄ'

The apostrophe is considered significant enough to be on that row, but so are Ö and Ä. It's reasonable for users to expect that software can accept the letter that is right next to L on their keyboard, yet there remain software engineers who assume that users won't be surprised that things break if they dare to touch this key.

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My point was that Unicode is newer than ASCII, and that we can't hope to deal with Unicode (Ö) properly if we can't even cope with ASCII (') yet. Nothing to do with anglocentrism at all. I agree that there are lots of annoying computing problems for non-English speakers though.

What I tried to say is that dealing with ASCII is meaningless; it's not even a useful starting point.

For the majority of people, a string format that accepts 100% of ASCII but 0.1% of Unicode is just as useless as one that only accepts 95% of ASCII. Therefore the goal should never be to get your ASCII coverage from 95% of 100%.

There are two issues here: one is not accepting Unicode properly, and the other is making incorrect assumptions about the content of strings. Both need to be resolved, and all this cultural butthurt is not productive to solving either of them.

Resolving the Unicode issues is undeniably a higher priority for speakers of foreign languages, but there are still plenty of languages and libraries whose support for Unicode ranges from nonexistent, to antiquated, to limited, to just plain broken.

There's nothing application developers can do in the short term to fix those problems, but by examining their own code and removing fallacious assumptions they can better facilitate the proper handling of Unicode once it becomes available in their underlying technologies. In the mean time, though, they may only have ASCII, or ISO 8859-X, or KOI8-R, or Shift-JIS, etc. to test with.

The ISO-8859-1 ASCII-based character encoding contains an Ö, too. That's not even Unicode. It may not be in the first seven bits of the ASCII alphabet, but it's so widely implemented that not supporting it is just as ridiculous as not supporting the apostrophe.

The problem is that there are so many standards for what characters 128-255 stand for.

there are literally hundreds of codepages http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/

The first A in ASCII stands for American, so it does have quite a bit to do with anglocentrism.

This is excessively literal and ignores the actual technical problems and circumstances in a global context related to ASCII and unicode. North Korea calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Does that mean South Korea is, necessarily, part of the DPRK, since that's what its acronym suggests?

I have no idea what you're talking about.

The first A in Ascii stands for American. This is because it was an American standard, created by and for Americans. Who pretty much all speak English (and spend dollars $!). What about ascii isn't anglocentric?

His point is perfectly viable. If Americans for some reason spoke Romanian, then the ASCII standard would also contain letters such as 'Â','â' (perhaps pushing out some special characters for them), so that Americans would be able to write Romanian on it. ASCII is the way it is because it is convenient for English speakers; it is not the way it is because it is for some reason harder to encode 'Â' then it is to encode 'A'.

I'm curious, are the Ö Ä characters so common that they warrant dedicated physical space? I've seen "Spanish" keyboards that have a dedicated ñ, but it seems like the letter isn't that common and would be better served via a key-combo.

In fact, some IMEs already intercept " ' : etc and won't print them literally, but assume they're going into a combo with another letter.

I've talked to a few friends, and they said it was a holdover from typewriters and not really designed with modern computing in mind.

This handy page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency has a frequency table that includes Swedish.

So, if you sort on frequency by clicking the appropriate arrows icon in the Swedish column, you can see that both Å and Ö are more frequently used in Swedish than B, C, J, Y, X, W, Z and Q. Of course, all of those have dedicated keys as well and I don't think that's going to be changing anytime soon.

The important point is that "the same letter" can have different roles in different languages. In many languages Ä is considered a "modified version" of A (like in German, I think) but still "mostly" an A when it comes to sorting and so on. In Swedish, that's just not the case, it's a separate letter. Our alphabet has first-class 29 characters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_alphabet).

If your last name is "Åkermark", you're sorting a loong way from "Andersson".

At least in Finnish and Swedish they are so common that they're considered letters in their own right. Å/Ä/Ö are placed in the alphabet after Z, rather than being mixed in with A and O like would usually be done with accented letters.

In Finnish, Ä is actually one of the most common letters while Ö is somewhat less frequent.

In Swedish, both "ö" and "å" are words on their own: ö means island, å is a small river or something like that :)

Is ñ less common than q, z, or j?

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