It is as though we don't want to move beyond the Apple ][
I am listening to This Week In Google (episode 18) and they got into a sidebar complaining about those annoying things that Microsoft Word forced on them that they don’t want, things like Smart Quotes and curly apostrophes and the like. You know the things it is supposed to do for the good of humanity.
I am not kidding about that last line. The written word has evolved over a long period of time, and gained a number of non-verbal cues to help and ease our understanding of the text. If you went back 50 years and gave someone a book with straight quotes and vertical apostrophes, they would complain.
Computers took that away from us for a while. ASCII did an admirable job of cramming in the essential letters, punctuation, and other glyphs needed by the English language, into a mere 128 character set. And that is what computers — and people — of the Apple ][ generation had to deal with.
And it broke our brains.
We started thinking that was all we needed. Well we could understand needing lowercase letters, and the accents and diacritical marks. Who needed more than that? I mean except for people who don’t use a latin derived alphabet, and people who wanted more subtly in their text, and other freaks like that.
And that kind of thinking has dominated our (the technology) world, with only lipservice to the idea that we should all do our part for localization and internationalization. In the mean time, people who knew better built the web as we know it.
And so you get browsers that do not do the right thing with smart quotes, et al; and who do we blame? Not the browsers for not supporting them, not the web servers for not properly changing them on the fly for browsers that can’t handle them, but the programs that are doing the correct thing.
And this is what frustrates me about my kind — the engineers and technologists — they are used to the status quo, they are too safely placed inside their bubble of people who agree with them, to think challenge their assumptions or fix this kind of thing in a graceful way.
I loved the Apple ][ too, but I grew out of the thinking it forced me into. You should do the same…
