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Here's a question for great minds to ponder (thanks to Pat the Field Method guy on the blogalization wiki and an anonymous commenter.
So, how would we do this? Who would we target? Who's in a position to make a difference? I know I wrote Dave Winer about it (and Weblogs.com did change changes.xml back to Unicode, but I doubt I had anything to do with it: Dave's a busy man). And how can we make ordinary users of, e.g., blogging software, aware of the issue and willing to militate about it to toolmakers? Could we collaborate on writing tutorials for the ordinary user? Do up a unicode banner and try to get people to add it to their "badge" collection? What?
We need to start some kind of advocacy campaign. People don't understand why Unicode matters.
Frankly, it's still not easy to deal with. For instance, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to make Mozilla choose UTF-8 as the default encoding. And I work with Unicode all the time, so imagine your average web user -- it must be truly flummoxing.
So maybe a good place to start would be to collaborate on some very simple HOWTO-type articles, aimed probably at bloggers: "What do I have to do to make my blog UTF-8 compliant?" "Which blogging systems support Unicode out of the box?" Etc.
Google bombing would be fun, heheheh. But what phrase(s) would we take over?
I guess another easy thing would be just a simple link campaign... you know, how people have those "Validates as..." links. Something along the lines of "This page is made with Unicode... if all the characters don't look right, click here..." And maybe a button? Sometimes buttons are sort of annoying, however... just text might be a better bet.
Just thinking off the top of my head.
So, how would we do this? Who would we target? Who's in a position to make a difference? I know I wrote Dave Winer about it (and Weblogs.com did change changes.xml back to Unicode, but I doubt I had anything to do with it: Dave's a busy man). And how can we make ordinary users of, e.g., blogging software, aware of the issue and willing to militate about it to toolmakers? Could we collaborate on writing tutorials for the ordinary user? Do up a unicode banner and try to get people to add it to their "badge" collection? What?
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Re: Unicode 4.0 ever?
10/08On a wider note, I waited a bloody long time for Unicode, and find it indispensible in my lexicographical pursuits. Who doesn't - it's opened the full potential of data gathering on the net. However, it is not perfect - and of course cannot be - once one veers even slightly off the beaten language track (although whether the scripts currently unsupported are really that way out is disputable), it provides little help. Without going into the whole glyph debate, the myriad layers to its true application will forever reside in the code that wasn't programmed due to the sheer amount that exists and that far larger quantity that hasn't been touched on as yet. BTW, it seems that some sites don't even support ANSI/ASCII properly, let along UC. I tried to type in my cat's name using diacritics on this very site. The result: T? - curtailed where the u grave should appear.
(Test: Tùdag).
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Re: Unicode 4ever
11/25Good intro by Joel Spolsky : www.joelonsoftware.com/articl...de.html
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Re: Unicode 4ever
11/11LJ seems to be UTF-8. Which blog software doesn't use Unicode, at this point?
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www.mythic-beasts.com/~mark/s.....creensaver
This fades random characters in and out on your unused Windows XP or 2000 screen. You have to have the Arial Unicode MS font arialuni.ttf, which doesn't come with Windows but does come with Office. Most of these characters are kanji, either traditional, Japanese simplified, or Chinese simplified.
