Basic Feature that I think is a must in any web broswer
Dekel Amrani
This is to the Non English users community:
How many time have you typed a URL in the address bar just to find that the
system was set for a non English characters, Which results in a page not
found error....
Wont you prefer firefox to detect that automatically and revert the
characters to English?
I was wondering what the Firefox developer community can say on such a
feature which I beleive will increase the user expiriabce with the browser.
And I think is easy to impliment....
Dekel
Axel Hecht
Ha, I found the guy to explain keyboards to me :-).
What kind of keyboard are you using? This is just my selfish interest in
finding out how accessibility is supposed to work on "language keyboards".
On your initial question, it'd be interesting to know if IDNs exist in
your language.
I'm kind of sure that we have no way to uniquely map non-English chars
to ascii, as that would require in-depth knowledge on the keyboard
mappings, which could even be tuned, right? To map that back, we
probably had to ask the keyboard driver for info. Not sure if that's
even possible on X.
Axel
Dekel Amrani
I am sorry to say but I am not a developer and I am not sure I understand
whats IDN.
However, In win32 there must be an API to call that changes the charcters...
right?
There are some sw outthere that are doing that , Maybe instead of actual
changing the charcters them selves you can just change the keyboard layout
that is currently used to english..
I think in Win32 anyway, Each PC has to have english enabled....
Dekel
"Axel Hecht" <l1...@mozilla.com> wrote in message
news:iq2dnbaDCeXas_HY...@mozilla.org...
Gijs Kruitbosch ("Hannibal")
> Dekel Amrani wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> This is to the Non English users community:
>>
>> How many time have you typed a URL in the address bar just to find
>> that the
>> system was set for a non English characters, Which results in a page not
>> found error....
>>
>> Wont you prefer firefox to detect that automatically and revert the
>> characters to English?
>>
>>
>> I was wondering what the Firefox developer community can say on such a
>> feature which I beleive will increase the user expiriabce with the
>> browser.
>> And I think is easy to impliment....
>>
>
> Ha, I found the guy to explain keyboards to me :-).
>
>
> Axel
I think he means the keyboard language setting used in Windows XP. By
default, there are some shortcuts configured to switch that, and if you
install, cf, a Dutch version of Windows, it will offer both a Dutch
keyboard layout interpretation and a 'normal' EN-US one. The problem, at
least for me, is that I've never in my life seen a Dutch keyboard
layout, and it's really annoying if you're typing and you (for any
reason) use whatever shortcut XP uses for this purpose, changing the
keyboard layout and therefor making you type complete nonsense because
the input from your en-US-layout keyboard is interpreted by an nl-NL
input driver/setting/whatever.
I agree that it would be a usability improvement, but I think it should
come from Windows itself, not so much from the browser side of things -
it shouldn't try to interfere with your windows preferences unless they
directly concern browsing only (cf. your homepage / bookmarks).
-- Gijs
Axel Hecht
> Hi,
>
> I am sorry to say but I am not a developer and I am not sure I understand
> whats IDN.
Internationalized Domain Names,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name.
> However, In win32 there must be an API to call that changes the charcters...
> right?
>
> There are some sw outthere that are doing that , Maybe instead of actual
> changing the charcters them selves you can just change the keyboard layout
> that is currently used to english..
As German domain names as well as other URL parts are totally valid,
that is probably the wrong thing to do in general.
Axel
Axel Hecht
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/globalization/topics/keyboards/KBD143.jsp
is what IBM lists as dutch keyboard, shouldn't give you too much random
stuff ;-).
> I agree that it would be a usability improvement, but I think it should
> come from Windows itself, not so much from the browser side of things -
> it shouldn't try to interfere with your windows preferences unless they
> directly concern browsing only (cf. your homepage / bookmarks).
As I said in my other reply, local keyboards are good to enter IDNs and
other native-language parts of URLs.
Axel
Mook
Hmm, this sounds vaguely like http://urlfix.mozdev.org/ :) Probably
needs some updating to work in Firefox, of course... That, and as far
as I can tell you need to manually invoke it.
(Too bad Chinese will have no use for such a thing, since the IME
involved doesn't transliterate...)
--
Mook
mook dot moz plus stuff at gmail dot com