microsoft

[MiaKalish@LFP]

I went there, and yes, the keyboard has been reformatted. The basic
underlying Problem here is that the space for alpha characters is limited.
For example, Apache has 36 characters if you count only the characters
necessary to create the phonemes. However, things like "ch' " are really a
separate character. People wh, o don't think it through can say, So what?
You have the glyphs to create the sound. But, when you map it to teaching
people to learn the sounds, if you use the typical 1-icon==1  glyph-sound
approach, then it gets dicey when you say, This character is {made by typing
these three characters together}.

This also creates issues around sorting, because you don't want to sort
c-h-' {that's a glottal there at the end, which is a sound made by closing
the epiglottis}, you want to sort "ch'", all-one-character.

To return to issues with the ubiquitous QWERTY: it is hard to redefine the
non-letter keys, because they have special codings that are signals to
different places in the software. So it is not a good technical idea to
begin to redefine characters that could cause word processors, email, and
web processing to go hoouey, because that really defeats the purpose.

What we need is a bigger keyboard. The Chinese and Japanese had this
problem. I don't remember how they solved it.

Mia

 numbers of other things have been piled onto the
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sean M. Burke" <sburke at CPAN.ORG>
To: <ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2004 12:56 AM
Subject: Re: microsoft


> At 07:57 PM 2004-11-17, jess tauber wrote:
> >Such keyboard layouts are out there in the computerized world- might it
> >not be time for people to start fresh and be weaned away from QWERTY
[...]
>
> I did...
>   http://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/learning_dvorak.html
>   http://interglacial.com/~sburke/tpj/as_html/tpj20.html
> ...but I wouldn't want to force it on people.
>
> --
> Sean M. Burke    http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/
>
>