Re: zwj hack in MediaWiki (Was: Consonant allophones in Minza)

Hi!

Benct Philip Jonsson writes:
> On 2007-10-05 Henrik Theiling wrote:
> > Of course, if you make yourself a list of all your ‍ hacks and
> > promise to remove all of them when the problem is fixed, then
> > everything would be fine.  But usually, hacks keep floating around for
> > a painfully long time.
> >
>
> On a wiki like FrathWiki one can easily cust search
> for all instances and remove them if nned be.
Well, maybe, but:

  1) You must think of that at the right time,

  2) Removing all ‍ in a whole Wiki is not correct.  Some
     languages actually need it.  You'd have to be very careful
     about the replacement and I doubt it could easily be
     automated (maybe Latin char + diacritic are something, maybe
     not, at least it would cost a bit of thinking).

That's just the problem with hacks: yes, they are not necessarily the
most complicated thing to remove, but they *wont* be removed.  It's
what I learned from programming: hacks are very persistent once
introduced.  That's why I say they are bad, bad, bad.

(I don't say I never introduced hacks -- that's why I know how bad
they are... :-))

**Henrik