3 ms·

To be fair, Microsoft invested a lot more into catering for Korean users than anyone else. Just three years ago, I set up Firefox on my Korean friend's compute

by akamaka 17y ago

To be fair, Microsoft invested a lot more into catering for Korean users than anyone else. Just three years ago, I set up Firefox on my Korean friend's computer, and found out that he couldn't properly type Korean in his webmail program, while IE worked fine. You can guess what browser he decided to use. That particular problem is fixed now, but the simple truth is that Microsoft got into the game way ahead of everyone else.

patio11 17y ago
This, this, a thousand times this. Things are getting better these days, but up until very recently the default OSS stance towards internationalization was "Unicode is hard, let's go shopping". It is hard to get managerial approval to deploy a system which can't run on his computer without corrupting display of the characters he inputs and whose documentation his engineers can't read.
- robin_reala 17y ago
  Maybe it’s just the FOSS projects I hang around, but I really haven’t seen this. Firefox for example has large amounts of resources expended on localisation.
  - quant18 17y ago
    IE8+Vista is still the only combination which can display traditional Mongolian script web pages properly. (Granted this is rather more obscure than Korean, but it's still useful to about 5 million people + every Qing dynasty historian.) All the others: 1. don't implement/misimplement joining/shaping behaviour 2. don't support vertical left-to-right layout Though to be fair, for the better part of a decade MonTex was the only solution for anyone who wanted to write a document in Mongolian/Manchu/Dagur/etc. http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2008/10/vertical-layout-in-ie8.html http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2008/10/vertical-layout-in-ie...
- thingie 17y ago
  We had a delivery from xkcd store delayed by one month because of few characters with diacritics, which the xkcd store software couldn't handle, and the package was sent back as undeliverable because of the unreadable address. And that was latin script, with just few diacritic marks (mostly just ASCII), I can't imagine what would happen with some non-alphabetic script… And that is far too common. On the other hand, modern desktop software (either OSS and MS) is, thankfully, quite OK, nowadays.
metalkpretty 17y ago
I concur; we're developing our site for a Korean audience. Hangul (Korean Language) users even stick with XP os and older versions of IE to avoid the hassle of upgrading.

by akamaka 17y ago

patio11 17y ago

This, this, a thousand times this. Things are getting better these days, but up until very recently the default OSS stance towards internationalization was "Unicode is hard, let's go shopping". It is hard to get managerial approval to deploy a system which can't run on his computer without corrupting display of the characters he inputs and whose documentation his engineers can't read.

robin_reala 17y ago
Maybe it’s just the FOSS projects I hang around, but I really haven’t seen this. Firefox for example has large amounts of resources expended on localisation.
- quant18 17y ago
  IE8+Vista is still the only combination which can display traditional Mongolian script web pages properly. (Granted this is rather more obscure than Korean, but it's still useful to about 5 million people + every Qing dynasty historian.) All the others: 1. don't implement/misimplement joining/shaping behaviour 2. don't support vertical left-to-right layout Though to be fair, for the better part of a decade MonTex was the only solution for anyone who wanted to write a document in Mongolian/Manchu/Dagur/etc. http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2008/10/vertical-layout-in-ie8.html http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2008/10/vertical-layout-in-ie...
thingie 17y ago
We had a delivery from xkcd store delayed by one month because of few characters with diacritics, which the xkcd store software couldn't handle, and the package was sent back as undeliverable because of the unreadable address. And that was latin script, with just few diacritic marks (mostly just ASCII), I can't imagine what would happen with some non-alphabetic script… And that is far too common. On the other hand, modern desktop software (either OSS and MS) is, thankfully, quite OK, nowadays.

metalkpretty 17y ago

I concur; we're developing our site for a Korean audience. Hangul (Korean Language) users even stick with XP os and older versions of IE to avoid the hassle of upgrading.