[maemo-community] Should we restart the Unicode voting?

[From: Andrew Flegg]

Quim wrote:
>
> You are receiving this email as a maemo.org registered user. It's an invitation
> to take part in a survey organized by the Maemo community after a proposal from
> the Maemo Devices team at Nokia.
>
> The question is about keyboards in mobile devices. What characters to put, what
> characters to sacrifice?

Obvious question here is whether this is direct keys, blue-arrow keys or characters in the palette. I'm assuming it's to determine the relative placement of all three.

 You know it's a hot topic and maybe yourself have
> thought sometimes: why do they put X which I don't used, while Y is missing?

s/used/use/. However, I'd remove this sentence entirely.

> $ % & ( ) < = > \  _ | ~ £ €

I thought there was an argument that the currency symbols should be removed as within a market they're important (perhaps less so to a savvy user, but I can imagine the reviews if a UK device doesn't show a pound sign), but a lot less so outside that market. It's probably also worth saying that all these keys would be accessible *somehow*.

Also, I'd suggest very carefully controlled test. Given the multi-regions receiving the email, the character encoding should be UTF-8, and this may require a change to the vote email sending thing.

Character encoding issues are hard to get right (especially in a system which wasn't designed for top-bit set characters and has multiple clients working off a loose spec), but they are very visible when you get them wrong.

Similarly, the voting page should have it's headers and bytes carefully inspected.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/