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What I think is kind of interesting is that South Korea arguably had/has the technical know-how to have built it's own domestic browser with SEED and good Hangu
by bane 7y ago
What I think is kind of interesting is that South Korea arguably had/has the technical know-how to have built it's own domestic browser with SEED and good Hangul/Hanja language support built into it and ended up with a very siloed alternative web. As an example, I'm thinking of the ubiquity of the Hangul Word Processor over Microsoft Word (which apparently has been around for over 30 years!) which gained near ubiquity in its domestic market.
However, I think the present situation is possibly the better one as a siloed, South Korea only web, separate and distinct from the rest of the Web, would end up being a much harder one to eventually migrate to the regular global web ecosystem vs. the current problem of just getting banks to stop using SEED and moving users to modern browsers.
- lifthrasiir 7y ago> As an example, I'm thinking of the ubiquity of the Hangul Word Processor over Microsoft Word (which apparently has been around for over 30 years!) which gained near ubiquity in its domestic market. There are two major factors in the ubiquity of HWP: 1. Its use of the de facto standard format in the SK government (the de jure standard is the ODF since 2007, but its use is virtually nonexistent). This stems from the fact that it was the most viable word processor supporting Hangul the script back in 1990s. 2. Its excellent support of table-based layout. HWP is a decent word processor in comparison to MS Word, and in some cases it is even superior. Koreans used to produce lots of documents based on tables [1] and HWP's UX was specially tailored to them. MS Word lagged behind for a long time, probably because this use case is not common in English worlds. [1] You can search for "이력서" (résumé) to see what I mean. Even a plain document tends to be styled in this way.