Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

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

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Friday, October 5, 2007, 14:53
Hi!

Benct Philip Jonsson writes:
> On 2007-10-05 Henrik Theiling wrote: > > Of course, if you make yourself a list of all your &zwj; 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 &zwj; 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