[whatwg] For Japanese language users, Web Forms should have a way to active/deactive for IME

[Henri Sivonen]

On Jan 18, 2005, at 09:41, Hallvord Reiar Michaelsen Steen wrote:

> Unlike us, Japanese users know what they are doing when using an IME
> :)

Yes, but asking questions (perhaps naïve) from the outside may 
sometimes be helpful and may actually uncover something that is not 
thought about because the close stakeholders are taking things for 
granted.

I think it is appropriate to ask for use cases just like use cases are 
called for with other proposals. It may look politically incorrect, but 
I don't think "i18n issues" should be exempt of the scrutiny other 
proposals are subjected to.

An example of lack of critical thinking in i18n: ISO-8859-15 was 
created to address issues related to Finnish and French. I am a native 
Finnish speaker, but I still think ISO-8859-15 was a bad partial 
solution to the supposed problem and actually made the problem worse. 
Because of i18n hypersensitivities, many Linux distros took ISO-8859-15 
seriously and actually shipped with an ISO-8859-15 default for Finnish 
instead of doing the right thing (UTF-8 for every locale) right away.

And yes, I have been on the other side as well. I think the lack of an 
"en-dash" list-style-type in CSS forces foreign bulleted list 
typography on Finns. Still, I was unable to convince the editor of the 
relevant spec that such a list-style-type should be added.

To get back to this case, fantasai already pointed to a generalization 
that isn't limited to the Japanese-specific point of view.

> It is actually very annoying to, say, submit double-width characters
> to a server that expects ASCII.

Point taken. However, I do consider such a server non-robust. I also 
consider a server that can't deal with decomposed umlauts non-robust, 
although I recognize the need to cater for such inevitable lack of 
robustness by normalizing in the browser.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://iki.fi/hsivonen/