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

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Friday, October 5, 2007, 11:18
Hi!

Benct Philip Jonsson writes:
>... > > So I would recommend to *not* use a &zwj; to hack-fix a broken > > behaviour of a browser or font, but instead to use a working browser > > or font, or if that is out of the question (for whatever reason), live > > with a distorted display, and/or inform the maintainers of the browser > > or font of not being Unicode compliant. > > I *dis*agree. I want as correct display as possible *now*, and I > won't sit around until someone fixes the problem if I > can fake it now. I think think that computers should adapt to humans > and not the other way around.
Well, nothing else is what I am proposing. But a little bit of patience for the humans who have programmed them would seem good, I think. You can speed up by *informing* the right maintainers. The big problem is that when everyone hacks around the problems, the problems will take longer to be fixed and when they eventually are, a lot of hacks remain that no-one sees easily (such &zwj; are not visible in text). Such hacks will most probably complicate life later (e.g. when trying to process such text). 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. I've been programming a lot and hacks are bad, bad, bad. Always. :-)
> I guess I'm not the compliant type...
Obviously not. :-) **Henrik

Replies

Benct Philip Jonsson <conlang@...>
Benct Philip Jonsson <conlang@...>
Herman Miller <hmiller@...>