Very similar to A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by M. J. Shields (frequently misattributed to Mark Twain):
"For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld."
Which reminds me — I was fascinated to learn that the Spelling Bee [1] is mostly an English-speaking thing, since many English words are derived from a variety of languages [2]. There is no such thing as a spelling bee in Germany, for example.
Germany actually enacted an orthographical reform in 1996, where they modified the spelling of certain words to make the language easier to learn. This was remarkable in and of itself, since it involved an international agreement between multiple German-speaking countries. As I've been learning German, it's been a strange and pleasant feeling to hear a long word and then be able to spell it correctly 99% of the time.
Ironically, because of my parent comment above, Mark Twain also has an essay on how much he hated learning German [4] (more due to grammar than spelling, although he was learning it before the reform).
It also a very american thing. At the top levels it isnt even about language and learning rules for spelling words. Rather it is pure memorization mascarading as knowledge. Success in the final rounds is determined by whether or not you have memorized a paticular word. None of the kids in the finals actually deduce a spelling from rules. Memorizing more words helps, but in the end it is just a numbers game. Many champions compile thier own lists of likely words based on previous competions,
And American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford, which is the standard for world english. The oxford is far to large for any child to memorize.
> And American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford, which is the standard for world english.
The Oxford English Dictionary is nice, but it's a British reference, and wouldn't make sense as the source for an American spelling bee. A Brazilian spelling bee (if that makes sense) wouldn't use a Portugeuse reference from Portugal either.
>And American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford, which is the standard for world english. The oxford is far to large for any child to memorize.
The full Webster's (which is probably the closest to a standard for American English) is 263K entries (which Google tells me is what is used for the Scripp's spelling bee) vs. 350K for Oxford. So smaller but not that much smaller. The standard Webster's is "only" 75K but there's also a truncated version of Oxford that's 125K.
This surprised me, so I've just looked it up. I'm now surprised for a different reason.
"Webster's New International Dictionary" contains "more than 600,000 entries" and it's a single volume, albeit a hefty one.
"Oxford English Dictionary" on the other hand, has "301,100 main entries" and yet the last paper version was 20 volumes. Presumably because OED contains more details per word.
Of course, for anything but a spelling bee it's pretty absurd to compare dictionaries by number of entries. Beyond a certain point: you're just buying more chaff like family names and alternative spellings.
This is what Merriam-Webster says: "Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, together with its 1993 Addenda Section, includes some 470,000 entries. The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, reports that it includes a similar number." (That's different from the other list I saw.)
But absolutely agree with your point. It's not like Britain and US vocabulary differs markedly in books and speaking.
> American bees are confined to the websters dictionary rather than the oxford
Noah Webster literally codified, and partially invented, American spelling—whereas Oxford's dictionary is a symbol of traditional British spelling. It's patently ridiculous to suggest that US spelling contests use a British spelling reference.
Languages which spell “phonetically” have to reform their spelling from time to time (and agree on whose pronunciation is authoritative) else the language ends up with the same issues as English and French. TANSTAAFL.
Personally I find the conservative spelling of English and French easier when reading as they often encode meaning which is stripped from “reformed” spelling such as German.
I ran into this phenomenon when I was idly learning the Shavian alphabet. It's not actually a phonetic writing system for me, because I don't have the same accent as the person who devised it. So, while it wasn't too difficult for me to learn to read it, (accurately) writing it would have required about as much rote memorization as it does in any other alphabetical language I'm familiar with.
> It's not actually a phonetic writing system for me, because I don't have the same accent as the person who devised it.
The alphabet was designed to be phonemic instead of phonetic for the exact reason you claim.
> While sometimes referred to as “phonetic” it is, in truth, phonemic, as Shaw wished. A phonetic alphabet would look quite different depending on the accent it represented. Shavian, on the other hand, does not purport to represent exactly sounds, but classes of sounds. A person from London, from New York and from Sydney all pronounce the AH sound differently, but each would recognise the sound when said by the others. In Shavian they would all write 𐑭 for this sound.[1]
I think the problem that you encountered is rather that there are certain dictionaries that spell words in a dialect that you don't use (think of how a British person says "past" vs an American person). But that is a different problem from what you described. You can very well use Shavian with any accent of English because it is designed that way.
As a southern American, I use pretty much the same vowel in "y'all" that most English people would in "past" or "bath". "Past" and "bath" are the same vowel as "cat" uses in the Queen's English.
It's an immensely useful word. Cf. "yinz" of western Pennsylvania, which is a contraction of "you 'uns" of Appalachia, which is a contraction of "you ones". The popularity of rap has spread it immensely in the past thirty-odd years, because Black English is strongly influenced by long association with white Southern dialect (and vice versa).
That distinction doesn't really resolve it, though. English dialects are diverse enough that there are many pairs of words that are homophones in one accent, and sound different in another. For example, I have relatives who pronounce "pen" and "pin" identically, and are generally hard-pressed to hear the difference in how I pronounce them. On the other side, I also have relatives who distinguish between "ferry" and "fairy", which I don't.
So, depending on your native accent, Shavian might still require you to use more than one letter for the same sound (and therefore have to remember which words use which), or use the same letter for multiple sounds. Or, at least, it will if you want to have standardized orthography.
> I have relatives who pronounce "pen" and "pin" identically, and are generally hard-pressed to hear the difference in how I pronounce them. On the other side, I also have relatives who distinguish between "ferry" and "fairy", which I don't.
Yes, some hard choices do need to be made. In cases like these, it’s almost always better to err on the side of preserving distinctions even if the speaker does not recognize the distinctions. Because over time, they will start to recognize patterns and understand the distinctions more while nothing of value is lost in English.
> Shavian might still require you to use more than one letter for the same sound (and therefore have to remember which words use which)
Yes and for the most part I think this is a good thing. It is a very small concession to make considering the alternative.
> Or, at least, it will if you want to have standardized orthography.
One single prescriptive spelling for global english may be impossible for the time being. But I am very interested in further researching a kind of neo-mid-atlantic accent.
French is even weirder because the adopted words are often pronounced in a completely different way than the original. We encountered that 2 days ago when my children (who are bilingual French/German) tried to explain to me about the Highland cows they learned about in a book they got. They book had instructions to pronounce the word so it sounded like "Island" so I got quite confused, if this was cows form Ireland or maybe Iceland.
The elusive "h". It is very common (for French speaking English) to either remove an h as they did there, or insert it where it don't belong as in "hot hair balloon" or the city of "Hamsterdam".
After 20 years of speaking english (french mother-tongue here) someone finally told me that you don't pronounce the "h" in "hour". I (and, I think, most french people speaking english) really do have to think of the spelling of a word before pronouncing it. And there I was being extra careful with that h at Hour. Now I have to be extra careful not to pronounce it…
But on a positive note, discovering all these small quirks are like "Achievement unlocked" kind of moments if you like learning languages.
I am French too and I am trying to understand how you pronounced "hour" before (my dog, cat and wife are already looking at me suspiciously).
You pronounced the "h" like in "hot"? (with the "h" making actually a sound?). I am quite surprised because we do not pronounce and "h" when it starts a word (usually at least), and I've been learning English in the 80's with Brian and Jenny (kudos to the ones who had the same manual) and it was not taught that way either.
In English you almost always pronounce an H at the start of the word. In fact I can't think of any examples other than Hour for when you don't pronounce it
As a native (American) English speaker I would never write or say "an hotel" and I don't think most people would. I confess I didn't realize this was even a debate. An hotel is apparently an older English grammar rule that it appears is considered largely obsolete.
ADDED: You do see a remnant of this with "an historical" but even that is generally not preferred in most dialects. https://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/drgw007.html Basically, it has to do with whether the initial "h" is pronounced in a given dialect of English.
It’s fun, after being taught about the H, to see that fellow French people don’t hear the presence or absence of H until they are taught; It’s like white noise, we assume the guy needs to breathe.
Were your kids pronouncing island like "iz-land" or "eye-land"? Just asking because other people in the thread seem to be focusing on the "H" sound rather than the fact that "Island" is the German word for Iceland. Another fun layer of confusion for multilingual kids :)
Heh. I was watching this TV series, in French, about some retired superheroes in
a village. In the first episodes they were talking about a supervillain, but I
couldn't quite catch his name, it was something like "zoolord", "zolord",
"zelord"...?
I looked it up on wikipedia and of course it was "The Lord" XD
I'm a native English speaker, and was thrilled by German's logical spelling when I first started learning the language. But then my German vocabulary began to include borrowed words from French and English, where spelling conventions go out the window.
For "Flannel" and "Flanell", it makes a surprising amount of sense when you then look at the pronounciation. The English word is stressed on the first syllable, like "FLANnel", which makes the N sound longer, whereas Germans say "flaNELL", which makes the final L sound longer.
Same spelling in Swedish, and until you mentioned it just now, I never even realised that the word is spelled differently in English.
It's not a common word for me to use, but if I had been put in the situation where I had to use it in English, it's likely I'd use the Swedish spelling.
Learning Spanish was the same for me. Learning character pronunciations and where to place emphasis is incredibly easy. Once you have that down you can pronounce or spell almost any word.
Germany seems to have gotten rid of sütterlin as well. None of my German friends can decipher it. I figure on using it for communicating with my U-Boot fleet, nobody will know what my commands are! HAHAHHAHHAHHAAAA
On suetterlin (or the overall topic of current) its not just a change about handwriting. At the beginning of the 20th century, most German books were published in blackletter (Fraktur) until it was abolished by the Nazi regime (internal reasoning "you cannot rule the world if the world cannot read what you type", what was communicated "Fraktur is jewish").
I think the scandinavian countries had similar changes, maybe sometimes a bit earlier.
For handwriting there had been going on a debate on whether to use Kurrent (Sütterlin is a Current) or Antiqua for centuries.
Hermann Hesse mandated for years that his German books still should be printed in Fraktur, until at one point someone convinced him that young people would not pick them up anymore.
Overall German orthography never quite recovered from the switch to Antiqua, because the sz ligature in Fraktur was not directly mapped to "sz" in Antiqua instead the letter ß was introduced, but the Swiss used French typewriters so they use "ss" instead.
Polish is quite similar, in a sense that if you hear a word you can write it down.
However we have some letters that - while phonetically the same - are used in different cases.
'u' and 'ó', or 'rz' and 'ż', or 'h' and 'ch'
Those are largely result of a Slavic country adapting Latin alphabet and over millennia trying to reconcile the two (clashing systems). The notations and pronunciations evolved slowly over the years and aforementioned are the remaining artifacts of the past.
In primary and secondary schools you'd get orthography test when teachers dictates some silly story riddled with unusual, rare trap words where you 'guess' those interchangeable letters.
(gżegżółka, or maybe: gżegrzółka, grzegżółka, grzegrzułka...)
There was a push for a similar reform to sort this out but went nowhere. Partially due to tradition and partially that there would be clashes like
'może' - maybe, 'morze' - sea
Both are pronounced the same, so if you drop 'rz' both words would have the same spelling.
In some countries there's no such thing as Spelling Bee as there is no such activity as spelling (or even a word for it). When I was a kid, if somebody didn't hear you well over the phone, you might repeat the name or word slower or louder. But if somebody heard you well, even if it's a brand new word or name, they can write it.
There was only one way to write down a heard word, and only one way to read a written word (minus possibly intonation/accents that cannot be captured either way). So while I disagree with some of the specific choices in the joke story (and they possibly inadvertently have some deal breaking inconsistencies, especially around the reformed i) dear gawd yes, we can simplify this nightmare that English calls spelling :O
I learned German before the reform and I grudgingly admit it’s probably easier to learn it now, but some of the lost bits had aesthetic value and some of the spelling is still maddening. Plus if you actually speak German in any German-speaking place other than (arguably) Hannover you will be using a lot of dialect. And Austria, Switzerland and Germany still have some pretty big differences in the official language, though they’re understandable if you’re fluent in any one, whereas the full-on dialects often are not mutually intelligible even for native speakers. And the there is the Denglish phenomenon especially in Berlin.
Hungarian spelling is super easy by comparison, but then the rest of Hungarian is not.
> Germany actually enacted an orthographical reform in 1996
That reform has since been reformed twice itself, and major newspapers have started to enforce their own orthography to fight the chaos that was caused by these "improvements". Most people my age (40-something) and socioculutal strata have ignored the reform altogether and keep using the old, "correct" forms. And the kids may learn the "easier" form at first, but once they get immersed with books and the news, switch to weird variants somewhere between old-school and new-school German orthography, with a heavy bias to old-school.
> switch to weird variants somewhere between old-school and new-school German orthography, with a heavy bias to old-school.
[Citation Needed]
It’s not that I don’t believe, so (mainly because I find most new forms uglier), but outside my own writing (which the spellchecker then complains about, and I change it) I don’t really encounter "Photographie."
I find "Photographie" all the time, most prominently in photography-related organisations and publications, so that might be carried over from old times before 1996... when "Fotografie" was already a valid variant spelling.
I never read about "Delfine" or "Spagetti", though.
I think "Photographie" is common when you want to sound stuck-up-your-ass artsy-fartsy. In regular use the word "Foto" is way more common than "Photo", unless you're the publisher of a black and white analog photography publication dating back to 1888.
My language teacher in high school told me he kept in with spelling tests in French but stopped in German because after a while nobody gets anything wrong. Have to agree, it's far far easier to spell stuff in German. I could do it after a short time living in Switzerland.
There was a fantastic interview with the author of a book on the history of the English language and how / why it’s so messed up. I bought the author’s book based on the ep, but haven’t got to it yet as I’ve acquired many more books throughout the pan.
The German spelling reform had mixed results though. The new reform was universally accepted only by governments and schools. Various publishers have house standards and the rules were amended and partly rolled back a few times. Many polls in Germany show widespread rejection by the wider population. At least we got rid of the long "s" (one of the complaints of Mark Twain) long ago.
Sorry, not Mark Twain. It was written in 1971 by M. J. Shields¹. It has since been frequently mis-attributed to Mark Twain, who only wrote about a similar topic in 1899².
Ah, another quote misattributed to Twain. Looks like it was submitted as a letter to The Economist in 1971 — I'll update the parent. Thanks for pointing this out!
It’s interesting to think about why the proposals for English failed while orthographic reforms in some other languages—Russian, German, Japanese, Chinese—succeeded, at least partially.
The late 1800s and early 1900s were also the peak of constructed-language movements like Esperanto and Volapük, which were riding on the assumption that there would be peace in our time if only we would all speak the same language and thereby see eye to eye.
Also somewhat related, in the same timeframe, Japan was opening itself up after nearly three centuries of isolation and catching up with technological development. While new loanwords flooded into the language from all kinds of European languages, some scholars argued for replacing the traditional Japanese writing system with the Latin alphabet.
The proposal never won any majority support, but the government did end up doing a smaller reform: After WW2, several character forms were simplified and an official list of characters in common use with standardized pronounciations was published by the government as a baseline for the school syllabus.
The last time English had a central language authority, i.e. l'Academie Francaise, was when words were first transcribed in Old English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qT8ZYewYEY
>[George Bernard] Shaw placed in his will provisions instructing his executor to organize a world-wide competition to design an improved English alphabet. A British designer, Ronald Kingsley Read, who had corresponded extensively with Shaw for several years regarding just such an alphabet, was selected along with three other finalists as the winners of the competition. Read was chosen to design the final form of the alphabet. The "Shaw Alphabet" or "Shavian", as it is now generally known, was the result.
I think any attempt at replacing the latin alphabet is doomed to fail. However, a spelling reform could easily standardize on a few letter combinations and perhaps include a few diacritics and make it much easier to spell and read English. It's never going to be possible to have a phonetic writing system given the variety of accents, but a phonemic writing system may be achievable. English writing also has many constructs that are not phonetic in any accent, and never have been - such as the s in island.
I think a totally new alphabet would be more easily accepted by people than a Latin spelling reform, which would see a ton of backlash around the uncanny valley and social stigmas.
A new alphabet (like Hangul), could take a long time to adopt fully though, and there’s nothing wrong with that imo.
Adopting a new alphabet has enormous costs, and it's very hard to imagine they can be outweighed by the benefits (unless perhaps you're adopting a different existing popular alphabet - probably Russian cyrilic or some Indian script being the only options, though perhaps a syllabary such as Hiragana would also be an option).
The cost I'm talking about is losing the ability to read the vast amount of text that has been already written in the current alphabet. For the Latin alphabet in particular, which is by far the most used writing system in history, losing access to all text produced anywhere in Europe, the Americas and most of Africa for the last few hundred years or so would be very hard to make up for.
I wish we could get rid of accents. It is frustrating to head to the deep south and not understand anyone. I have no doubt that other people feel the same way about my accent.
What do you think about Quickscript vs Shavian? Someone wrote a unicode doc[1] comparing the two. But sadly, only Shavian exists in Unicode today. That makes Quickscript almost a non-starter for me.
One quick thought is that Quickscript merged together a couple of letters that are similar. It merged "err" and "array" and it also merged "ago" and "up". Merging err-array is probably fine, but in Shavian, "up" is stressed while "ago" is not. So a little something is lost in the up-ago merger.
> It’s interesting to think about why the proposals for English failed
I think one reason is that phonetic spellings wouldn't work with some regional dialects. Consider 'bath' - many southern English people pronounce it as if it had an 'r'.
It's not without precedent either; due to printing presses, the English alphabet lost the letters Eth (ð), Thorn (þ), Wynn (ƿ), Yogh (ȝ), Ash (æ) and Ethel (œ), to be replaced with phonetically similar letters (like th) or just sort-of-similar-looking replacements (ð replaced by y, as in "ye olde", which is pronounced "the old", or ȝ replaced by z like in "Cockenzie", pronounced "Cockennie" or "Dalziel" pronounced "Deeyel").
the Y in "Ye Olde" is actually thorn. If you look at thorn, you can see how it happened - the loop was unlooped.
Also - English was never consistent. The thorn/eth split was completely random and was down more to style than correctness. Modern spelling of Old English has standardised the spelling. But macrons and dots over g's and c's also never existed, but are common in modern spelling for OE.
The funny thing is that because of this English native speakers are incredibly good at understanding you even when you mispronounced words quite a bit.
This is very different to some other languages (e.g. Japanese is famous for it), where only a slight mispronounciation usually means nobody will understand what you're saying. I have encountered this many times, I pronounced a word just how I heard it and people were just giving me blank stares, only when I showed the spelled word did they get it. I never encountered this with English native speakers.
Are you sue that’s the reason? French has an equally wacky spelling system, but French people are notorious for refusing to understand tiny errors in pronunciation by foreigners (while North African French speakers will accept anything you say so long as you get a letter or two right).
Meanwhile, Spanish, with its perfect phonetic spelling is spoken by a people who will go out of their way to understand you no matter how bad you speak their language.
My experience is that it’s mostly cultural, and often comes down to whether the person you’re speaking to has themself had to try using a foreign language, thus gaining the empathy to help you out.
> My experience is that it’s mostly cultural, and often comes down to whether the person you’re speaking to has themself had to try using a foreign language, thus gaining the empathy to help you out.
I think another part is how much diversity there is in speakers of the language and the common dialects.
Because of all that linguistic variety, if you're an English or Spanish speaker you're generally more accustomed to hearing different pronunciations of your own language day to day than French speakers are (on average, YMMV, etc).
I lived in Romania at one point, where this was even more obvious. There are comparatively few distinct dialects of Romanian, and most Romanians have never heard non-native speakers speaking their language, so no matter how friendly they were, understanding unusual (OK, wrong) pronunciation was just not a common skill.
Eh, France also has a number of languages that are distinctly not French. But it also has a long history of being a heavily centralized state where everything revolves around Paris, and other languages/dialects were ruthlessly suppressed for a long time.
> French people are notorious for refusing to understand tiny errors in pronunciation by foreigners
Keyword: refuse. They can, but pretend they don’t. It’s racism disguising itself as cultural pride. (Source: I’m French and am certainly not proud of that part of my heritage)
It's elitism, France's hate of foreigners is not founded on skin colour or heritage (e.g. both your parents can be French and if your French is bad, you get treated poorly anyway).
It's not founded on skin color you're right, but you're wrong about heritage. Obviously Not All French People Are Like That (I should hope so, as a French person myself). But the ones concerned will be MUCH pickier about people's grammar, spelling and pronunciation if they perceive them as not French.
But yes, elitism is also present: If you're perceived as French and your french is bad, you will also be treated poorly. But it's a different kind of "poorly". In fact, Paul Taylor talks about that in his stand up "Franglais" (I HIGHLY recommend a watch, it's hilarious especially if you're familiar with both French and British/American culture, and it's available for free on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pae2AMnmUVA)
No. Chauvinism is when somebody declares that his/her language is superior to other languages, e.g. because it used by a broad audience. Russian and English speakers are often doing that from my own experience.
I had a similar experience when I tried to learn Polish; my friends, who knew I was trying to learn, simply couldn't understand what I was saying, and couldn't guess either (and my ear found it very difficult to hear the difference between the expected pronunciation and what I was saying).
My heart wasn't really in it, but I was also very discouraged by this.
> French people are notorious for refusing to understand tiny errors in pronunciation by foreigners (while North African French speakers will accept anything you say so long as you get a letter or two right).
I think it's a mix of multiple reasons.
First, French is a language which not only has no word stress but actively blends words together when speacking in a sentence. Correct word pronunciation is key to understanding and what foreigners view as small errors sometimes do actually make their sentence unintelligible to a French speaker from France.
Then, language proficiency is a strong social marker in France. So, if you speak broken French, people will subconsciously view you as lower class/uneducated.
Your mileage may vary, but my experience with Danish and Norwegian is similar. Norwegian which has very phonetic spelling is very forgiving on mispronunciation while Danish—a very similar language but spelled much differently and not very phonetically—is not nearly as forgiving on mispronunciation, and being Danish you do mispronounce a lot as you are learning the language.
>> The funny thing is that because of this English native speakers are incredibly good at understanding you even when you mispronounced words quite a bit.
Oh dear. This is really not my experience. In the first couple of years I lived in the UK it was a huge pain making myself understood by the natives, until I finally managed to approximate the local accent. I was even very frustrated that nobody seemed to make an effort to meet me half-way, in my efforts to be understood. I would often have this experience, where I'd be speaking to someone and they'd stare at me with a blank face, seemingly just waiting for me to repeat myself in case they could understand me this time around.
Among non-native English speakers I think this experience is common. Conversely, I've been able to communicate just fine with non-native English speakers who had very thick accents and spoke only broken English, exactly because both parties in the conversation were patient and attentive.
In my Master's I had a tutor from Indonesia. For me he was like the best teacher ever and I felt he made everything crystal clear and helped me really understand some hairy concepts. Then I spoke to a British friend who complained she couldn't understand a word he was saying and she hated every minute of his class.
Sometimes I think native and non-native speakers of English really speak two different languages.
Setting aside the question of utility (ease of use issues),
English spelling is also a "side channel" which persists information about the word which is lost (recoverable only via lookup) when spelling is normalized.
With things as they are, the etymology of words is often visible in their spelling; this has practical implications such as imparting shades of meaning through allusion, which are one reason English has retained lots of near-synonyms, but not discarded them. This means it allows for a particular kind of nuance.
As a native speaker of English I find the relative paucity of vocabulary confounding (or comical); it is now expected in my (bilingual) household that when where English draws distinctions, Spanish reuses. My German-speaking father in law is always entertaining us with cases where German constructs words through liberal compounding, where English doesn't.
Which is just to say, problems aside, English's maddening spelling almost always encodes useful information. For some uses. (Not tech docs, but more than poetry.)
Interesting footnote to this: English has many "backformations," cases where the spelling of some words has conformed over time to that of similar words from other languages, even when they etymologically unrelated. My favorite example of this is "strawberry" in which the "berry" is a backformation.
Another footnote: English vocabulary and etymology also encode history beyond provenance.
The words in English for meat and its sources are the go-to example.
The words for the animals, are from Anglo-Saxon. The words for the meat as you eat it, are from French.
Because England acquired its French from occupation c. 1066; the peasants knew the animals but it was the new French-speaking aristocracy were the ones that ate them.
English is not my native language, yet I didn't realize how peculiar it is until I saw this video below ("What if English Were Phoenetically Consistant"). All these years I thought my native languages were hard to learn for foreigners (French for the spelling, Serbo-Croatian for it's grammar, both of which have seemingly been designed by insane people) and English easy, didn't realize how hard it is prior to said video. I guess it is made easier by the fact it's the go-to Internet and international language so I get more exposure to it than I do to my native ones.
If you know German, there is an entire book written in this style, introducing a simplifying spelling and grammar each chapter [1]. It is called "fom winde ferfeelt", a pun on "Gone with the wind" turned into "Missed by the wind". Highly recommend.
Except unlike TFA, the orthographic reform suggested by Shields actually makes things easier in the mid-term (long term, pronunciation will drift from spelling again)
>The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
(Note: Japanese uses a phonetic alphabet. For the most part, the characters you see (when kanji is written out in hiragana/katakana) are sounded exactly as they are in when written/spoken individually/independently. There are some dialects though that modify this, notably Tokyo's replacing "su" with "s" and other changes)
Isn’t there a ton of drift, though? Yes, spelling in Japanese is easier than English, but listening and speaking exercises seem just as important if not more important than they are for English. Otherwise you’ll sound like a cat got your tongue and the person you’re speaking to will reply with にゃんですか？
I'm not sure if there's grounds to say that the importance of speaking/listening exercises is different from any other language. Regardless of what language you're learning, you'll probably sound like a fool if you can even spit out any words at all if you don't practice speaking.
I just wanted to make a punny joke. “Nyan desu ka?” is a play on “Nani desu ka?” which basically means “what?”. And nyan is the Japanese word for a cat’s meow.
I like historical spellings because they tell the story of the development of the language; even though it can be pretty chaotic and tough to master, the chaos itself has a certain charm (for me) in demonstrating how how one of our oldest technologies lives and evolves in the minds of the human beings that use it.
Besides that, though, I don't like the Shields proposal because it's specific to his dialect. No "r" in "letez" and using an "a" in "jast" for instance makes this difficult for me to read.
Text artifacts in the Infocom text adventures Planetfall and Stationfall use this system. Play the games long enough and you get pretty good at reading them.
I don't think there is any language that actually adopts a 1:1 mapping of letters to sounds, but many come very close to adopting a 1:1 mapping between groups of letters and groups of sounds (for a particular accent).
For example, Romanian is a pretty phonetic langauge, and it adds 4 letters/diacritics to the latin alphabet to come closer - ă [uh], î (no equivalent in English), ș [sh], and ț (like [zz] in pizza).
Even so, it also has some letter combinations - ce sound like the [chai] in "chair", ci sounds like the [Chi] in "China"; but c in any other place represens a hard [k] sound. To mark a hard [k] before e or i, you then use che,chi (why they didnt do it the other way around is beyond me, since [ca],[cu],[co],[că],[cî] all spell the same [c] sound as [che], [chi]).
The same rules apply to g - ghi sounds like the [gea] in gear, while gi sounds like the [gi] in gin.
X of course represents [ks], but can also reprezent [gz] in certain words, such as examen (exam).
I is normally a particular vowel or semivowel sound, like [ee] in English. However, in word final positions after a consonant, it's usually a consonantic sound. For example, the word "mări" (seas) is pronounced as a single syllable, with just a short [ee] sound at the end. However, the word "{a} mări" ({to} enlarge) is pronounced in two syllables, [muh-ree], accenting the second syllable.
The personal pronouns I, he, and she (eu, el, ea) are all written with an e at the start, but always pronounced with an extra [ee] sound. The phonetic spelling would have been ieu, iel, iea but for whatever reason this was not done. No other words share this feature in the standard accent, though it happens to many/all words starting with the letter e- in other accents.
As with many other languages, borrowed words tend to preserve the original spelling, even after they settle on a Romanian pronunciation. For example, the word "weekend" is written exactly like this, not the Romanian phonetic spelling "uichend". Older borrows do get this treatment though. For example the French "chaise longue", a reclining chair, was borrowed into Romanian a long time ago and is now spelled "șezlong".
It sounds the same, that's the point. Languages like German and Italian for instance follow the same principle, everything is phonetic, nobody needs to spell anything (heck Italian doesn't even have a world for "spelling"), every letter always sounds the same all the time. Kids learn to read very fast, and you always know how to spell people surnames because they are pronounced "as you write it", with a 1:1 correspondence.
Old and Middle English were like that too, but then the Great Vowel Shift happened and now English still mostly retains the Middle English spelling with apparently random pronounciation rules.
Nobody devises a non-phonetic alphabet, when English adopted the Latin alphabet it was mostly phonetical. The issue is that the written language always moves slower than the spoken one, because written language lasts for longer.
It certainly makes assumptions about pronunciations that mean for a lot of people it will sound different. "Meik" vs "maik" for a replacement for make for example threw me off for a bit (like, meek? Meyek? What does that mean in context?) Also I instead of Y is radically changing how I read that paragraph: "Year" going to "Ier" indicates to me either a pronunciation of "eer" or "aiyer" or "eiyer" instead of starting with that defined "yuh" sound.
It is using the Romance (i.e the original Latin) vowels. English got its vowels all garbled and messed up by the great Vowel Shift, so now every Latin vowel in English does not sound how it is supposed to sound. Heck they don't even follow the same rules most of the time, because English spelling is fucked up beyond repair. That's ironic because that makes writing English much more complicated, even though the language is quite simple to learn at a basic level.
A is /ei/ and lots of other sounds.
E is /i/, sometimes it's an open e, ..
I is /ai/, sometimes not, ...
O is always a diphthong, plain /o/ does not exist anymore
U is /a/, /ju/, ??
Y is there for the show, often it's used for /j/
English like German has lots and lots of vowels, while Latin and Italian have like, 7? The letters were supposed to have only one sound at most, but history clearly shows us that it's easier to reuse or adapt an existing letter than invent a new one (look at [ng] for instance, or [th] which became used mostly because nobody had types to print thorn and eth).
(Speaking as someone whose native language is non-Latin-based, I think it was a very bad idea. Worse still is their attitude that if some website becomes unusable, "just file a bug".)
> I think it was a very bad idea. Worse still is their attitude that if some website becomes unusable, "just file a bug".)
Mozilla is run by one of the most inept group of designers, who seem committed to killing off the last non-Chrome browser.
You know what feature they need to remove? Telemetry.
Their telemetry must show that practically zero of their users actually use the collected telemetry, and Mozilla itself can't seem to avoid using the "data" to make bad decisions.
I doubt the goal is to kill them. They would be very inexpensive as controlled opposition for a rival-browser-making company that wanted to plausibly avoid regulatory notice.
Overall, yes it is still a major player (20%) but notably almost all of that is on mobile where it's 27% of users worldwide (presumably in large part because of the iOS browser ban).
On desktop meanwhile, Safari is now below 10%, slowly but steadily declining, and it looks like to be overtaken by both Edge and Firefox within the next year or two. Bad news for Safari, but honestly surprisingly good news for Firefox. Edge's success is promising for the web too imo, if it gives Google less influence over Chromium.
Chrome was based on WebKit, Safaris codebase. They’re still very close cousins despite Chrome hard forking to Blink about 8 years ago. WebKit it’s was a fork of KHTML
I don't think it is obvious that this thread is about browser choice. The subject looks to be the absence of competition to Chrome. Lack of personal choice is one reason to be concerned there, but another reason might be handing Google de-facto control over standards.
> The subject looks to be the absence of competition to Chrome
The presence of a proprietary web browser that only works on a specific platform restricted to a certain class of individuals which can afford to be on that platform doesn't really add much to the competition.
> another reason might be handing Google de-facto control over standards
I don't see Apple having that control to be any better although from what I've been reading about web browser engines and the underlying technology, I doubt anyone else, besides a few behemoth tech companies, can take any sort of control. The web is too far gone for that.
I fail to see how one could possibly think these things are not fundamentally intertwined arguments, so I really don't understand what you are trying to prove here.
My previous point was that a walled garden being "huge" offers no benefit for the vast majority of people outside of the walled garden. How does this not apply to these arguments according to you? Because if they do, and I claim they do, then that reinforces my other statement that talking about walled gardens being huge is completely missing the point.
A prison might be a sizeable piece of land, but it's still a prison. I'd like to go to the lake in the summer, even if it might be more dangerous than a paddling pool.
I'm amused that this data-driven design choice has comments restricted. Surely users being frustrated enough to find the relevant bug and provide direct feedback is a strong signal of something.
Edit: On second thought, how can you even attempt to use telemetry to justify feature removal when a sizable portion of your userbase disables telemetry?
> I'm amused that this data-driven design choice has comments restricted.
If you are up for a second serving of irony, comments for that bug are restricted because someone tried to incite the HN mob onto it a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30379655
We all draw different lines for what feature is not common yet not rare enough to remove, so the context always matters.
For this subject of character encodings, browsers have already reduced their repertoire of suppported encodings for a good chunk of the last decade: the Encoding Standard [1] is substantially smaller than what it used to be (I know because I did implement all of them back then). Some of them (e.g. UTF-7, not exactly "removed" from the Standard because it was never added AFAIK) caused security issues but others (e.g. HZ) didn't and only got removed by the lack of usage. This kind of decision, either for or against, can be only backed with telemetry-like quantification anyway. No criticism in the issue was based on the concrete evidence; Henri Sivonen is right to say that he "can't address remaining non-Latin problems without seeing concrete examples that need addressing".
> Around thirty years ago I was a kid with a computer. I learned to program quite a few years before I learned English. I also used DOS without understanding English. I knew what to type to do things, but I didn't know what the words meant. I could start programs, I'd play in QBASIC, write small programs and amusements. To me "PRINT" was the word that made text appear on the screen. I learned years later the word meant something in English.
Wow, this is exactly what happened to me (probably between 8 and 10). I had an old 286 computer, where I learnt BASIC by reading programs already available on the computer.
I wrote programs, but had no idea what the keywords meant. I remember reading out loud "IF … THEN … ELSE" that I pronounced "if … ten … elsse", and my father in the room corrected my pronunciation, "it's if … then … else".
I was very surprised, because he didn't know BASIC at all. "How do you know this?"
"It's how we pronounced it in English. It means 'si … alors … sinon'." o_o
It was a revelation to me: the "keywords" I typed in BASIC programs were not just meaningless tokens for the BASIC language, they came from English and had a meaning outside BASIC.
Addressing the remaining non-Latin problems is extremely easy: just give users the ability to choose an encoding. Or rather, do not remove it.
Note that they are not actually removing any encodings themselves, so the argument from security / attack surface doesn't arise: the website can still send text in any of those encodings (or malformed but autodetected as such). This is purely about UX.
> Note that they are not actually removing any encodings themselves, so the argument from security / attack surface doesn't arise: the website can still send text in any of those encodings (or malformed but autodetected as such).
No. If the visitor is able to freely choose the page encoding, then the attacker can lure one into doing so by presenting a seemingly malformed partial text. So it will allow the attacker to control the victim page's encoding, only less effectively though.
---
I'm also very annoyed about the disproportional amount of criticism received by Firefox compared to Chrome here, because Chrome has proactively removed the encoding selection UI well before Firefox tried to do similar. And---to elaborate what I referred to the "telemetry-like quantification" before---Firefox concluded that the UI can't be completely removed without breaking a lot of existing pages using the telemetry [1], hence this "Repair Text Encoding" feature. It is hopelessly absurd to blame Firefox alone for this issue.
Chrome is Google's playground, so it's pointless to criticize - I long since stopped having any expectations of usability or feature-completeness. Firefox is (was?) supposed to be different.
The good thing is that we have Vivaldi, Opera's spiritual successor in many things including this one: if somebody needs a knob, it'll be there.
The whole attitude of "if your use case is millions of people, we don't care about you" may be excusable for some kind of mega-corporation enjoying a monopoly or near-monopoly in its area. For a project that constantly playing catch up lately, cutting off users may not be the best idea ever. Projects in such position should pay more attention to niche users, because if they lose both niche and mainstream, they will have nothing.
> "just file a bug".
It's not just "a bug", it's "a low priority bug" - it's a polite way to say "I couldn't care less".
I'm sure it works quite well with UTF-8. I'm less sure that it is able to consistently distinguish e.g. various Cyrillic encodings. And yes, CP1251 and even KOI8-R are still occasionally a thing when it comes to websites.
Have you encountered concrete cases of failures with Cyrillic single-byte encodings (where the letters fail; there are cases where box drawing characters fail due to preferring letters over box drawing)?
If I recall the story plot points correctly, you should probably have a Not Safe For Work tag on it. (content warnings: sexual assault, murder-suicide, torture)
How can text be NSFW? No one except you would know the actual context and longer story but you, so unless there are words like "PENIS INTO VAGINA" with big letters, I don't see how any plaintext can be NSFW.
Work filters may trigger on phrases, so it's not like someone would see it walking by, but it might be flagged for review. If the page flagged is some thread on HN nobody cares, but maybe if it isn't ...
But in reality it's just a common short-hand content warning, similar to [PDF] right before a URL that ends in .pdf.
Not quite as succinct as you put it. Falls into the category of "automated tools probably wouldn't notice it, but don't leave it open for sensitive colleagues to see" back when colocating was a thing.
> When AM had altered Benny, during
the machine's utterly irrational, hysterical phase, it was not merely Benny's face the computer
had made like a giant ape's. He was big in the privates; she loved that! She serviced us, as a
matter of course, but she loved it from him. Oh Ellen, pedestal Ellen, pristine-pure Ellen; oh
Ellen the clean! Scum filth.
NSFW is used as a blanket warning for anything that may be offensive, triggering, haunting or traumatizing, not necessarily work. NSFL is also often used (not safe for life). Basically anything that people could go "I wish I hadn't read / seen that" at. Another one to use is CW, for content warning, followed by what it contains.
But I'm sure you know all of that. The warning is not for you personally, you may disregard it.
I thought I used the internet a lot but I must be wrong if this definition is correct. I have never seen NSFW used outside of telling it is not safe for WORK. Text is always safe for work - well unless you live in a dystopia of course but then I'd think you have bigger problems than links on HN - and anything else I see marked with NSFL or a trigger warning.
I don't think there is a usual definition. I have seen varying definitions of immortality. The immortals in Highlander could only be killed by beheading. The immortals in Gulliver's travel couldn't die at all, but continued to age, resulting in an island full of senile people.
I think the two most common definitions I have seen are "negligible senescence" (e.g. Elves in Tolkien) and "cannot die in any way" (e.g. some religion's understanding on the concept of an immortal soul). The latter is fairly common and matches "cannot ever die even if you want to."
She claims to suffer a severe neurological reaction to the vaccine. Claims her "brain is on fire". But she's not getting believed because the vaccine is safe and effective as proven by science. Adding to her anguish. A glimpse into a dystopian moment.
This is exactly how it feels with every iteration of my company's new design. Let's disappear scroll bars! Let's hide the menu! Let's order sub-menus by frequency of use, rather than by alphabetical order! Let's get rid of border lines around text entry boxes! Let's make clickable and non-clickable text the same font, style, and color! Let's--
I do not understand why designers are so insistent on making tools so difficult and unpleasant to use.
"Move fast and break things" with a healthy does of deep disrespect for the user mixed into a young and mostly self taught discipline (UI/UX) based on nice sounding pseudo-science that cherry picks usability studies to meet aesthetic desires of the highest-paid opinion in the room.
The modern web disgusts and enrages me more often than not.
If UI designers were making a car, the pedals would switch spots for no apparent reason every year, and the steering wheel would turn into a trendy motion control interface.
You jest, but we're almost there with Tesla, where the wheel is no longer a wheel, the turn signals are two buttons (on the same side of the wheel) rather than a stalk, the gear shifter is removed and the car literally tries to guess whether you want to go forward or backward, and every other control is on a touchscreen, and does indeed move around or disappear into a menu at least every year.
Race cars are optimised for racing, not manoeuvring. Try applying their wheel geometry to you road car. You won't get far, though you will get there very fast and very sideways.
Aftermarket steering wheels are widely available for road cars. Most of them are wheel shaped.
The more important con of touchscreens for cars is that you have to look at them. Well-designed controls for cars can be reliably operated by feel once learned.
I'm less convinced by this: controls within easy reach while driving need to be physical because you can reach them without looking, but the center control dash is always a little bit too far away from a comfortable driving position to start with - and thus a reasonable candidate to be touchscreen-ifyed provided you don't put serious controls on it.
i.e. I don't mind touchscreen A/C controls or something, provided the driver's wheel also has those controls (which in my old Toyota Prius it does).
IMO the big innovation is making sure that everything I would want to do while driving is literally at my fingertips, which should be on the steering wheel.
I do not understand how Tesla was allowed to put de-fog button for the windshield in a submenu on the touchscreen. This is a critical safety feature. The only explanation is that it is not needed often in California.
While you generally have to do a quick glance to find the center console controls, after you get a hold on them you can put your eyes back on the road because of the physical feedback. You would need incredibly good haptics on a touch screen to accomplish the same (I haven't experienced incredibly good haptics on any car I've rented (my car uses mostly physical buttons))
I’d develop that argument a little further, you can’t stop the manufacturer from changing the UI you currently like arbitrarily at some point in the future.
I don’t like that on my computer and definitely don’t want it in my car. It’s bad enough when you buy a new car and things have been “improved”.
Why not just remove the physical windshield wiper controls, try to make them automatic, and then bury the overrides in a touchscreen menu 2 layers deep? And what if you got rid of the PRND stock and putting your car in reverse involved making a gesture on the same touchscreen? Genius!
No see to put your car in reverse you need to throw your arm over the passenger seat and look over your shoulder, activating the pressure sensor in the back of the passenger headrest, and the face recognition sensor in the rear window.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but this is a terrible idea. A family is driving on the highway. Kids are fighting in the back seat. The mother, who is driving, turns her head and tells them to stop. The car is rear-ended by a dump truck, and all three are dead.
I have to assume modern auto transmissions have computer lockouts to prevent you from money-shifting it into R while at speed, don't they? I'm thinking like modern dial-a-shift where you aren't directly manipulating the transmission with the shifter.
I've never tried to test it cause I don't like horribly expensive mechanical noises, but yeah.
So true. Victims of the 'We are better at this one thing than other automakers, so clearly we will be better at all of the other things too' mentality.' Like seeing metrics that defrost is rarely used so lets bury it in a sub menu.
> Why not just remove the physical windshield wiper controls, try to make them automatic
FWIW, 25 years ago, I had some generic assignment when I was student, I don't remember the exact details, but I made it on auto-windshield wiping tech, and what I found was that multiple patents already existed back then (one from Mercedes or BMW, I don't remember which ; it might have been both). I'm mystified that we aren't seeing those everywhere yet.
I drove a few rented cars in Norway. All automatic windshield wipers sucked. They did not active in a light rain and in heavier rain drove wipers unnecessary frequently. The least bad was Kia. At least they got frequency right.
They might not be common in the US? All the cars I've had in the past ten years (French and German brands) had automatic wipers and they were not expensive models.
Some work better than others, but most of the time when they don't work well it's because the wipers are worn and need to be replaced.
I think I must be missing something in this discussion but my 2014 Golf came with auto-wipers, auto-headlights on, auto-rear view mirror dimming and auto-full beam dipping.
Isn’t this a solved problem and completely standard on most new cars for a few years now?
That has been slowly but surely trickling down. I think the high trim Honda Civics have auto wipers now.
The new tech these days is to spray fluid out of the wipers themselves. The blades have a lot of holes laser cut into them, as the blades move across the windshield they spray fluid just an inch ahead of the blade. It's starting to become very common in the luxury car brands, even the lower tier Lexueses and BMWs are getting them as the newer gen cars are released.
It doesn't sound particularly cool, but when you try using them it is a very nice feature to have.
My Jetta GLI has automatic wipers, I don't quite trust them yet, though. Seattle rain has a way of making things hard to see without much actual liquid happening.
That sounds like a very effective way to replace cheap, generic, easily replaceable windscreen wipers with expensive, high margin, brand specific wipers.
On my old Peugeot 405 (from 1990) that was done by an additional tube attached to the metal of the wipers. The wipers themselves were just standard and not especially expensive.
It was interesting but I didn't find it especially better. They moved away from this and the later models just have normal sprayers. Maybe the very latest have that again, I don't know.
> This was a real problem until US Gov mandated "PRND" shift order
Automakers also equip automatic transmission cars with paddle shifters, which really give you no tactile feedback to let you know what gear you're in. They also make it difficult to shift while turning. A traditional manual with the HH shift pattern gives you that feedback that allows you to know what gear you're in and doesn't limit your ability to shift while turning.
Conversely it's an automatic car - generally speaking you're not shifting. The flappy paddle style is just for the pseudo-racecar feel, not practicality.
Some automatics don't really give you much control over what gear you're in. I have a 2012 Honda Odyssey with a PRNDL button. With L, you can drive in first gear up to red line (not sure of the speed). There is a D3 button that will downshift to 3rd gear if the shifter is in the D position. You can downshift to 2nd if you move the shifter to the L position when going less than 60 mph, but that's not obvious. The car will also downshift to 1st if your speed drops below 30 mph and won't upshift to 2nd even if the speed goes above 30 mph (meaning I have to shift it back to D and then back to L if I want to keep it in 2nd). 3rd gear doesn't really provide much in terms of engine braking when going less than 50 mph
> Who needs the crap „startpage“ as a startpage anyways.
I understand this 100%. Youtube is the same exact thing - the home page is total garbage unless you enjoy watching the same 8 videos you just watched. But we're in a thread about bad UI/UX, so I'm going to complain that the "default" being bad is a bad thing.
Perhaps a bit off-topic, but the browser extension Unhook^[1] can be used to clean up the Youtube interface pretty well. I use it to remove everything except the subscription feed.
> I do not understand why designers are so insistent on making tools so difficult and unpleasant to use.
Because they need something to pad their resume. In fact, most of the things that are wrong with software today are for the same reason.
Executives want to make bold changes, so the Start button must be "re-imagined." For the same reason, Product Managers "re-imagine" the menus that have been in place for years and Product Designers "re-imagine" the design language to remove all cues that a button clicks and a panel scrolls.
In my routine trips to the auto parts stores over the past 20 years, I have seen their throughput drop as more and more of these modern ideas seeped in. Their text menus had been the same for decades, with as many options for a next action as there were keys on the keyboard. If my intuition is correct, they were remote sessions to a server/mainframe. How about that for keeping the computation close to the data. Now that has all been replaced with a single button and a cursor.
I'm not a die-hard CLI user by any stretch, but I understand the impulse after watching usability circle the drain year after year. There's a healthy middle somewhere and I am hoping to find it.
Let's make clickable and non-clickable text the same font, style, and color!
Let's remove all indications that buttons are buttons!
I've actually had to use a site which had all four combinations: static text that looks like static text, static text that looks like a button, buttons that look like static text, and buttons that look like buttons.
I think it's because they are usually targeting the design for the broadest audience, so they design for the lowest common denominators and simplify the screen as much as possible to streamline "the main flow" of their app. This involves removing as much elements as possible to cause the least confusion when they interact with the app for the first time.
This means that the app will work amazing and without thought ("it just works!") for 80% of the population but will be non-functional for the 20% of the population which includes power users and users who would have been willing to go through the initial learning curve for a more powerful app.
Just to note: I'm not deriding the "lowest common denominators" as I am definitely one for some domains. For example, I chose the app with the simplest deisgn for doing my taxes as I didn't want to spend time learning about taxes.
It's that once they did all the useful work they are not old enough to retire so they have to invent something to do. To be fair, most of us are doing only marginally useful work.
If I remember correctly, Chrome started all this BS with the infamous burger menu. With traditional designs, I can easily find what are the operations available and now I have make at least one extra click to discover that. Making it worse, some websites do not implement the menus correctly so when you move your mouse trying to click one of the sub-menus, the pop-out hides automatically as now you have moved away from the burger menu... It was kinda make sense as we used to have very small screens and the screen estate was very tight. But now we have much bigger screens, such trend just gets worse...
What's crazy to me is that I was promised Back In The Day that everything would be sunshine and roses in software design, and especially in Web design, once the "digital natives" took over and all those bad ol' print designers retired or got pushed out—but it sure looks to me like the exact opposite happened.
What seems to have actually happened is that the "digital natives" are better at dealing with bad UIs than those who learned how to use computers later in life, so the pressure to make usable interfaces diminished.
I think there also is a conflict between interfaces that have a flat learning curve on one hand and interfaces that work extremely well once you are used to them. I think the second category gets too little attention. It's also much harder to user test the second category but for certain types of applications it's what should be preferred. Ideally you can have both a flat learning curve and high efficiency for experienced users. To me the JetBrains IDEs are an example of this compromise. Examples that are fabulous for experts are of course Vim and emacs
Having done research into UI/interaction design, I can confirm that all research in this area prioritizes things that (a) can be measured quickly and (b) with a high degree of confidence.
Good luck running a controlled experiment where multiple folks use an interface for an entire week and then become power-users of the system!
Wonderful recommendation (I have read it). I don't think anyone should be allowed to design one single consumer product until they have it practically memorized.
I don’t think is true. Functional design may not be optimally pretty in some cases. However, the eye finds things like readability, organization, and visual hierarchy to be visually appealing - so functional design can very well be pretty in some cases (for example, Blender’s UI is highly functional, but still relatively visually pleasing). I’m not saying that all functional design is pretty, but I am saying that rejecting all pretty designs as non-functional is incorrect.
And regardless, function before form does not invalidate form after the fact.
EG, you're building a bridge. It needs to do its job, and not collapse. There are many perfectly functional designs, which have appealing form. Yet, if you want to actually be able to use the beast, it:
- needs to be wide enough to pass traffic, but not too wide (waste of money)
- needs to be able to keep the traffic from careening off into the abyss each use
- needs 100 other things such as the above
But once the above "functional" criteria are met, form is fine. Why not make it look good? Great! Yet, don't (as an example) overlay form which then reflects sunlight into driver's eyes, so they can't see and crash on the bridge.
This is all reasonably understood with normal day objects.
But, when someone engineers a bridge, they have to go to a decade of schooling + years on the job, to rise to that position. And the same for people designing beautiful buildings, or homes. They know the restrictions, the load requirements, and then they layer extra on top of that.
Not even sure what I'm fully rambling on here about, except I guess that I think UX/UI should only be attempted after years of using software in a professional capacity.
I was in to a store the other day, and they were looking up stock. It was an ncurses display. And the employee was zooming through it, as typical, with keyboard shortcuts, and FAST.
UX/UI is really the problem. Making things pretty gets in the way of functional first. Keep it function before form, and you're fine.
And if anyone rattles on about Apple and Steve Jobs, from what I've read, heard, and watched? He was 100% about "function first!". He'd go ballistic if simple functionality was hard to get at, or missing, or buggy, or incomprehensible.
Yup, he wanted form to look good. But that came on top of proper, perfect function.
I want to push back on this idea that designers are out to destroy everything.
I think one interesting way to look at these sort of changes is analogous to the introduction of new features in code. In the short term, new features can be added to the existing codebase without the need for much change, but eventually, the overhead becomes problematic and there is the need to make more structural adjustments.
I think it’s similar for designers, who get to the point where new features don’t have a natural home in the existing interface and want to make changes. Just as a junior developer might be tempted to rewrite from scratch, a junior designer might be tempted to introduce a new mental model and rearrange everything. In some cases this may be OK but generally you need a more nuanced approach. The fact that users are the consumers of the change, not designers, is where the analogy falls apart, and thus the need for a more thoughtful introduction of any change.
Obviously the abrupt changes are those that cause a negative reaction, especially when combined with the exaggerated desire to clean up an interface. However, not all change is for changes sake. Sometimes it’s just a case of trying to respond to constraints and make the best compromise when dealing with changing software.
This annoys me too, but since starting work at a company which uses single sign on, it's started to make sense why certain sites have this pattern, e.g. if your login is an email address and the domain is enrolled to handle sign on outside of the service, you are redirected and the original website doesn't have the ability to capture your password.
For personal use, I find 1Password typically handles multiple screen logins, including 2FA quite well, although requires an extra UI interaction.
I understand the technical reason behind it but still, it shouldn't be that hard to provide a separate page with both fields on it that non-SSO users can bookmark.
Reminds me of when we removed the “Previous Track” button on the Rdio player controls. The data showed that users skipped to previous only a tiny fraction of the time. Lasted about 3 days in production.
Underlying this fallacy is the assumption that usage should somehow be uniformly distributed across all features. In reality, a power law distribution is more natural.
If a designer doesn't change things, obviously they have achieved peak design, and are now irrelevant and ready to be fired. As long as they move things around, they get a paycheck.
I don't disagree with you in the slightest for most other software tools, but this is an internal tool that we're selling so that people can build their own applications. There's no advertising--in fact, the fewer seconds people spend inside the application, the better it is for our bottom line because it means we can pump out the applications faster.
> in fact, the fewer seconds people spend inside the application, the better it is for our bottom line because it means we can pump out the applications faster.
This might be true from a bottom-line perspective, but the marketing/product/engagement manager's targets (whether company-mandated or personally-mandated to use them as resume bullet points) may still hinge on increasing "engagement".
I think there are a few related causes behind this behavior:
1) Visual changes show better than feature lists. I'm not convinced this matters anywhere near as much for customers as marketing folks seem to think it does, but marketing values it regardless, management values it (it'll show better to their bosses, too), and product managers, designers, and front-end developers value it (so they have nice-looking things for portfolios and presentations, both internal and external)
2) Making something that looks good in a screenshot or demo is not the same thing as making something that works well (that is, has "good UX"), and making something that does both well is hard enough that the talent (and environment/budget) to do it may be fairly rare. The former matters to those concerned about point 1, so that's what gets priority (which is why so many redesigns are neutral, at best, as far as UX, and many are worse).
3) If design is done well, it's heavily cyclical. Design guidelines and languages and component libraries and such should be built up such that most design work only happens when there are initial designs, very large feature add-ons that break with what the previous design guidelines can accommodate, or redesigns. So, if you're a designer and want to stay comfortably employed, and you're a manager who doesn't want to surrender head-count or lose your people to other projects, and a large part of the org has various incentives to push initiatives that result in something nice to to look at (see 1, again) what happens? Lots more redesigns than need to happen. LOTS more.
[EDIT] And all this is before we even consider possible business reasons to deliberately make the product worse, which are also A Thing.
It's because we (in the tech world) hire UI designers based on how beautiful their portfolio is, not how usable their design is. "But that's the job of UX!" you say. Yes, but we don't hire UX people. We just hire UI people and expect them to secretly be UX people despite giving every indication to the contrary. Oh well.
Function is as much a part of design as is aesthetic appeal. A designer who doesn't consider function on the same level as aesthetics is a bad designer.
Frequency of use seems like a better metric than alphabetical order. The order of the alphabet is arbitrary. Besides, I think this is fairly normal - I just had a look at all the applications I have open now and not one has submenus in alphabetical order
They're not going to allow something well designed to be made on the first pass. Sure that would be good for the user and company, but they need to justify their 40hr/week salaried job somehow. It's like planned obsolescence but for work.
This is cute but it refuses to actually think about the problem of keyboard layout design. Take the reductio the other way and you end up adding keys to create a keyboard with a key for “the” and one for “and”, “or”, “but”, “of”... The author is just saying they want the QWERTY keyboard exactly as it is without actually thinking how this layout got there in the first place.
The Caps Lock key makes no sense in the context of a computer keyboard. Back in the days of typewriters when everything was a single monospaced font, typing in all caps was the only way to make something bold (there weren’t italics, bold, font sizes or different fonts). Having a convenient way to hold down the shift key was nice in this context. In the context of a computer keyboard that has multiple fonts, sizes and weights, it is a dumb key. Larry Tesler’s dictum “no modes” is immediately applicable. Steve Jobs tried to get rid of the caps lock key twice (once at Apple and once at Next). Google’s pixel books have replaced it with a search shortcut, which is not that useful but much better than having a key whose primary function is to mess up password entry and shout online without any extra effort for shouting. On a Mac keyboard there are a few common substitutions for caps lock that you can use. Any of these substitutions are preferable (I have it as Option for tab navigation but any of the other main hot keys make a better use of keyboard real estate).
The caps lock key as a key is essential, once remapped to something else. As a vim user, once remapped to Esc, everything makes much more sense, as your keyboard gets closer to the original keyboard on top of which vi was created https://images.app.goo.gl/wZkyxFosFF4jCRCJ8
But it's not necessarily a caps lock key, but an extra function key more easily accessible. There's quite a few keyboard designs out there that have button clusters for thumbs, so that you can use your thumbs for more than just pressing space.
In the same vein: I discovered the pleasure of the major modifier being under the thumb on MacOS, triply astounding on the MS Natural 4000 keyboard with its huge alt keys (they map to ‘command’ on Mac due to the position). And then I learned that Emacs was made for keyboards where the ‘control’ keys are under the thumbs.
I have an Ergodox EZ keyboard (which is programmable using QMK, or Oryx which is a wrapper around QMK) and I set caps lock to esc on tap but ctrl on hold.
QMK supports as much as 4 different behaviors per key:
- tap
- hold
- tap-hold
- double tap
And you can also set keys to change the layer each with their own behavior for
caps lock.
I'm sure many users don't use Home/End/PgUp/PgDown, since these keys are the first to go on majority of nowadays laptops. Even if there is plenty of space. And yet, I use these keys all the time. When I'm considering a laptop that's the first thing I check. Am I in a tiny minority?
There's Esc. I lost count of how many times I looked at a laptop or a mobile keyboard and got baffled because Esc, a very standard key with no replacement, wasn't there.
Also, the right Alt and Ctrl are quick to go. But somehow there are always buttons for the windows and pop-up keys.
Some laptops manufacturers on my country also think it's a good idea to remove the forward slash and quotation mark. That's because it's the 105° key, and they can't reuse the US 104 keys standard they got from abroad, but well, somehow they think it's not a problem at all.
On the other direction, it's a good thing that desktop keyboards stopped including a "power my computer down" button where most keyboards have delete.
Some people can not understand how standards bring value.
I had really hard time choosing laptop based on availability of those keys!! I really don't know how those thin mac users live... wait, isn't this (once again) one of those Apple's "minimalism" trends? I think so.
On my 2015 MacBook Pro, ⌘+[arrow keys] are respectively mapped to home/end/PgUp/PgDn. That's how I live. In fact I find this interface easier to use than the discrete home/end/PgUp/PgDn keys on my external keyboard, since I have to look at the keyboard to find those as they're not near the home row.
If you’re old time desktop user you wouldn’t have to look for these keys, they’re at the same place for decades. Heck, I even don’t know which combination I’m pressing to go to the begining of page or line, that’s muscle memory at this point.
That said, I acknowledge that you have your own prefered way, and that’s how it should be. As it also should be that these extra keys exist at least on bigger laptops, if not on ultraportables.
I remember using a laptop with Home/End/PgUp/PgDown on Fn + arrow keys. Using those felt very natural. I wish it was more common so I could have the same on my desktop keyboard.
Yes, we are a tiny minority. I refuse to compromise on this, and still use a ThinkPad with a 7-row keyboard, but most people have just given up already and went with the mainstream crap. :-(
> The Caps Lock key makes no sense in the context of a computer keyboard.
Remapped to <Compose>, the Caps-Lock key is essential for someone who writes in many different languages. Removing it would not make me very happy.
That being said: I'd love someone to build a modern, USB/Bluetooth-enabled variant of the old Space-Cadet keyboard [1]. Would pay good money for it, too.
Given that even Apple not only keeps the Caps key, but also has it traditionally big, I suppose the market demands it. But then who are those people who uses it?
Props to Apple, which in 2022 still provides an easy option to remap caps more or less straight in the keyboard configuration. And actually provides that even on iOS (which I was stoked to discover), though the remapping options are limited.
And boo to microsoft, the only significant OS where that’s not a native option, you need the powertoys and in my experience it’s quite unreliable: regularly capslock will revert and you have to go into the ‘toys and flip it off and on again.
I’ve never looked but I guess it’s some sort of registry setting which every update resets, without the ‘toys being aware of the info?
I use caps lock very often, because when touch-typing it's A LOT EASIER than keeping changing the finger I use to press Shift on the correct side of the keyboard.
And if you think "well, just keep shift pressed and use another finger to type what you would have typed with your pinky" it just means you're either not touch typing or doing it "wrong" :) There's a reason there are two shift keys on a keyboard, yet I rarely hear people complaining about this but plenty complain about the "useless" caps lock.
TL;DR: you can pry caps lock from my cold dead hands. I need it.
(ETA: maybe I should just remap double-shift to caps and be done with it, but that's just one more thing I have to learn and one more configuration I need to do on a new machine).
The thing is: I don't have a problem with my current layout (and, as I said, adding sticky shift is one more thing to configure on new machines or after a OS reinstall). Also, I've been using that key for its original purpose for some 25 years. I don't see myself learning that again too easily. But I might try to see if it sticks (pun not intended).
What surprises me are people who consider a certain key "useless" simply because they don't use it, so it should be removed/reassigned. And there's plenty of them in this thread who think that I'm doing it wrong by using the key for the exact job it was meant for.
I must admit I was among those people. I have not seen anybody using it. But then most people I have seen typing or discussing Caps are not touch-typist.
> typing in all caps was the only way to make something bold
Thinking of it, with modern messaging apps that support text formatting, it would be useful to have dedicated caps-lock-style keys for bold, italic, monospace, etc.
Writing out constant names is a minor and rare event (even more so with any editor featuring autocompletion). This does not come close to “useful”, let alone extremely so.
The value of capslock is that it provides an essentially blank key which can be remapped to something useful e.g. Ctrl, Esc, Meta, …
A good keyboard doesn't really need re-mapping, as the ctrl, esc and meta/alt keys are already readily available. You could argue for mapping caps lock to Super or Hyper if you're an emacs user maybe, but I for one never felt the need.
Exactly as the article mentions, caps lock is a nice to have, though rare, key. Removing or remapping it will complicate your typing in those scenarios for sure. if you find a better use for that space where it simplifies other more common scenarios, great. But just removing it would be idiotic.
> A good keyboard doesn't really need re-mapping, as the ctrl, esc and meta/alt keys are already readily available.
They’re not, unless by “good keyboard” you mean “custom layout”. On all the keyboards I’ve ever known, the almost entirely useless capslock takes one of the more valuable places on the keyboard just left of the home row. It’s the modifier key which requires the least movement by far, yet with a native function which is almost entirely worthless.
I’d like to see your hypothetical keyboard where control (to say nothing of esc) is anywhere near as easy to reach, despite both being used significantly more than caps, and caps being trivially and fully dispensable with unless your days are spent writing SQL with all keywords in all caps.
> You could argue for mapping caps lock to Super or Hyper if you're an emacs user maybe
No, you really could not, unless you’re part of the minority which flies with fully custom keybindings. But even then control is such a central modifier of emacs that making it more accessible and require less contorsion tends to yield the highest bang for your buck.
You could always remap the old control to super or hyper instead of having two control keys I guess.
Personally I use the Microsoft Sculpt keyboard [0], and holding Ctrl down is as easy or easier than caps lock, particularly for Emacs C-x or C-c, where I can use my right pinky on C-. Also true for Ctrl+z, a pretty common combination in most modern UIs.
It's true that Esc is nowhere near as easy to reach, so if I used vim I'm sure I'd like to switch them (alt/meta is also easy to reach for me, so I never felt the need to use Esc for Meta in Emacs; and having two Alt keys anyway makes it better).
> I’d like to see your hypothetical keyboard where control (to say nothing of esc) is anywhere near as easy to reach
With multi-function keys (as supported by e.g. QMK-powered keyboards, or software like kmonad) allows adding multiple functions to a key.
e.g. "tap-hold": "tap CapsLock key sends 'Escape', hold CapsLock key sends 'Ctrl'" would be useful for someone who uses Vim and/or Emacs.
Taking 'tap-hold' a bit further, you can try putting the modifiers (which are only useful when held) under the home row keys: putting Alt, Gui, Ctrl, Shift underneath ASDF, (and reverse: Shift, Ctrl, Gui, Alt underneath JKL;). -- So called "home row modifiers".
The advantage is not needing to move the hand, and not needing to use the weaker pinky finger. Although, it can take some getting used to.
Holding down shift is not really a problem for constant names since you need it for the underscores anyway. You can type CONSTANT_NAME without lifting the shift key but with caps lock you still need to use shift anyway.
You can't "hold down" shift when writing CONSTANT_NAME if you're doing any kind of touch typing. You constantly have to switch between pressing left shift or right shift, so basically you're writing 13 key-combinations. With caps lock, you only need to use a key combination once (for _), instead of 13 times without.
Any kind of touch typing? No, I don't agree with that. I can type 140+ wpm and don't look at the keyboard, and I can hold down shift while typing CONSTANT_NAME. Pinky on shift, remaining 9 fingers type CONSTANT_NAME. The pinky would not be involved with this particular constant even if it were free. The kind of touch typing you learned in school has a problem with this, maybe.
A is normally typed using the left pinky, so holding left shift will force you to use the left ring finger for it.
To be fair, on some keyboards, including the one I use, it's easy to reach both the right and left shift keys, so it's easy to alternate shift keys as needed to avoid using other fingers or moving your hand from the home row.
I guess it's important to note that I would use the right shift for this. I have the ability to choose on-the-fly rather than be forced into one or the other by a typing method that I learned in school. I could still do it with the left shift but it's not the one I would choose for this.
It's probably fairly obvious what I think about the taught-at-school touch typing method. It's a decent middle-of-the-road option that's intended to be easy to teach and to work for most people in most situations; that's all.
Why is the constant screaming at me? Why is the fact that it's a constant important enough to be encoded in the styling of the letters, but not important enough to be encoded in the name. Why isn't the IDE or the compiler keeping track of the constantness of the variable and reminding me to not do the wrong thing? If they can and are, why am I not trusting them?
And if they can't, why am I writing in a language that doesn't even have JavaScript levels of a type system?
That's still 3 extra key strokes, including a key combination, to go from writing the constant name back to writing the next word (with caps lock: caps lock, constant_name, caps lock; without caps lock: constant_name, Esc, g, shift+u, b, i - you also need w, i to get back to the end of CONSTANT_NAME and keep typing). Also, switching mode, applying a command, then switching mode again versus pressing a key for uppercase and pressing it again for lowercase is a much bigger distraction from my point of view (emacs user) but maybe you actually get used to that using vim.
I disagree. It is useful to maintain caps lock for typing but allow shift presses for keybind combinations. Having to re-enter caps lock after every shift combination would be annoying
The idea of somebody slamming down both shift keys before getting into an internet yelling match is pretty hilarious. I think both caps lock and this ULTIMATE SHIFT idea are probably both not necessary, but I have to thank you for putting the funny image in my head.
«Caps Lock» key should be renamed to just «Lock». Lock+Shift will behave as Caps Lock, Lock+Tab may behave as Enable Automatic Autocompletion, Lock+Alt may behave as switch to alternate alphabet, etc.
Technically yes, but in practice no. The previous products were extremely expensive, keyboard-wielding niche products which were extremely hard to come by. The iPad was the first viable commercial product, with multitouch, Wi-Fi, and a friendly OS. I bought one right after release in 2010, at the time Android was in its infancy, most people had a flip phone and I’d never actually seen a tablet in any form before (other than the iPod touch a few months earlier). It was mind blowing.
Also, revolutionary != new. Apple rarely is the first to enter a new market.
I was one of the people who made fun of the iPad when it was announced, and I am grown-up enough to admit that I was 100% wrong. I made fun of it for being a "wannabe laptop", and at some level I still kind of think that, but I didn't consider that people might not want/need all the features of a laptop all the time. I didn't see the appeal of "an iPod touch with a bigger screen" because I couldn't see through the eyes of a non-geek.
I don't have an iPad, but I do have a Kindle Fire HD10, and I have to begrudgingly admit that I like it a lot more than I thought I would.
If you wanted to compare the N900 to an iPhone, that might be a slightly more apt comparison, but at the end of the day, the iPhone and iPad completely changed what "phones" and "tablets" look like. Their predecessors and successors are extremely different devices and perform different functions.
They do have different form factors, but do similar functions.
To qoute Wikipedia: "The N900 functions as a mobile Internet device, and includes email, web browsing and access to online services, a 5-megapixel digital camera for still or video photography, a portable media player for music and video, calculator, games console and word processor, SMS, as well as mobile telephony using either a mobile network or VoIP via Internet (mobile or Wi-Fi)."
I mean, yeah that's what the first iPhone might be described as. Before the release of the App Store. Unfortunately for the N900, it was released by the time the 3GS was out.
It has a resistive touch screen, which massively hampers what you can do on the device. This precludes it from any real gaming, or interactivity. By the time the N900 came out, the Apple App Store had 100k apps and 2 billion downloads. That's two magnitudes larger than the number of apps Maemo had in total.
It's not a matter of "a different form factor" it's more that the N900 is a completely different class of device, it fundamentally can't compete with the iPhone and its massive (even at the time) ecosystem.
If you were to squint with glasses of a completely different prescription to yours, sure, you can say they "do similar functions", but let's be honest with ourselves. The N900 was too little too late. It was released at a point in time when capacitive, glass touchscreens with high interactivity games and apps are what was the new norm.
It depends on how long before you look. In 1990s they were fairly popular as the smaller devices were expensive and small screens were hard on the users and custom development was not as easy, so field data entry was often with some b&w tablet, often connected to a portable printer and other accessories.
It's a weird and interesting thing to see; if others do it, it's a weird nice product for a handful of people, but once Apple does it it becomes mainstream and widely adopted.
Counterpoint though, it didn't work out for Apple's touch bar.
While it's an amusing story, it feels like the analogue doesn't really work. In reality low value options are removed because few users use it. In the story options (keys) are being removed even when used by absolutely everybody, as long as the relative frequency of the key is low. That's a huge difference.
And of course you don't evaluate an experiment to remove an option like in the story, by looking at before/after rates on how often the option is triggered.
It's e.g. pretty clearly not what happened in the the Firefox encoding menu example that motivated the rant.
> In reality low value options are removed because few users use it.
Should accessibility options go away as well because few users use it?
The underlying point (even if not conveyed through the best analogy) is that there are critical features that must exist regardless of what telemetry says.
Honestly this was really just a low effort joke to vent my frustration, not intended to be fair or convincing.
Anyway, the point is more subtle than that. Whether a feature is used is as much a function of the overall design as much as the feature's usefulness. If you hide a feature away or make it awkward to access, then it will see less use. Sometimes an infrequently used feature can aid a more frequently used feature to work more smoothly.
In my opinion this was already done with the nightmare that have been the function keys in laptops for three decades
I use F2 and F6 and screen contrast buttons every single day. And the FN lock is used just infrequently enough that there is ZERO possiblity I will remember its state at any given moment, especially considering reboots or sleeps that may toggle it. And I use it just enough that it isn't worth spending 5 seconds to move my hands away to figure out its state, consequently every single time I hit an FN key I get an undesired result from pressing it. For the love of god we are talking about adding 12 keys to the keyboard, they can be half-height, or simply making the FN lock into a shift function with no lock capability to GUARANTEE determinist results when pressing a key and the lock is in an unknown state. Can we please start a petition.
Wow, I just looked up a photo of this keyboard and it's actually a physical switch, not even a key. What an odd design decision.
Actually, the keyboard layout looks pretty odd in general. I could forgive the Insert key (maybe there actually exist people who use it), but is there anyone who needs dedicated Scroll Lock and Pause keys?
edit: actually, I guess Excel power users might use Scroll Lock? It still looks like a pretty odd layout to me regardless.
I'm so confused by your comment about scroll lock and pause. Have you never used a desktop keyboard? This is exactly what the 104 or 101 key standards since the 1980s or so include and always have for backward compatiblity. Every keyboard on the planet would have these if we only used desktops. But when laptops were introduced there was a compelling reason to compromise and remove keys. To this day I remain frustrated to death by the missing keys, most especially End and Home and the arrow keys. I need that functionality on a daily basis, and that need has not reduced in the twenty years since I went to mostly laptop usage.
Scroll lock usually only is important if used for something specific in a specific app. And pause, yeah, has fallen out of use. But it is mostly that laptops are now so common companies avoid assigning functions to keys no one has.
Even on desktops, smaller keyboards are better ergonomically (because they allow you to put your mouse closer).
Home, End, PgUp and PgDn can be accessed on most (all?) compact keyboards as Fn+Left, Fn+Right, Fn+Up and Fn+Down. I use those very frequently, to me they're actually more convenient than dedicated keys (because Fn is near Ctrl, Alt and Shift, which are also used for cursor manipulation).
I personally don't care for large ('inverted T') arrow keys, but there are certainly laptops (e.g. Lenovo's ThinkPad line) that offer large arrow keys if that's something you desire.
And even back in the '80s there existed various keyboard layouts (PC, Macintosh, Sun).
I use a HHKB mainly because it has a correctly positioned control key. I wish other companies would make them this way too - caps lock just isn't useful.
Genuine question: have you had problems with software remapping before?
I discovered the joys of control-in-place-of-caps-lock when I bought an HHKB, but I got it because I liked it as a keyboard. Since then I've had no trouble converting caps-lock into control with other keyboards.
If you don't mind an unrelated anecdote, while I got used to the diamond-shaped arrow keys of the HHKB, I kind of wish they would have been hjkl or just on the keyboard itself. I find that I still need to use arrow keys too much for that layout to be comfortable.
I have no real problem with remapping, I do it on my ThinkPad for when I'm not at my desk.
Really it boils down to the fact that I dislike the capslock key taking up valuable real estate. From my perspective has no real use, I never type more than the odd word in caps. I want to reward companies who omit it in the hope more will follow.
I use vim so hjkl are natural to me, but I got used to the diamond in short order and don't have any issues switching between them.
> I want to reward companies who omit it in the hope more will follow.
Let's hope not, I really like my comfortable ectra escape key. The pictures I saw when quickly searching for HHKB looked incomplete to me, control is fine in the corner!
Hopefully we'll have all options though, a comfortable keyboard is a must.
I started mapping caps to super after a stint daily-driving a chromebook a few years ago and it's stuck with me. I'm surprised none of the major vendors besides big G have thought to repurpose caps for something more useful.
The use of upper case used to be much more common. Many forms were filled out in upper case, even in the days of typewriters. When writing, upper case was used to add emphasis. The use of upper case was also common while programming.
I suppose the development of the capslock key has more to do with much older typewriters. Mechanical typewriters took a fair amount of effort to use.
If your adventurous, you could get a keyboard that supports qmk or zmk open source firmware and gain full control over what your keys do. I don't have caps lock bound.
Personally I strongly recommend replacing caps lock with control on a Mac keyboard for better tabbed browsing shortcuts. The hot keys for move one tab left/right are Tab + Control and Tab + Control + Shift.
If you replace caps lock with control then all these keys form a nice large column of keys at the far left end of the keyboard.
Try Ctrl! It's much easier to reach than the normal ctrl key. If you're on Windows, RandyRants' SharpKeys is a great utility to do the registry edits for you.
I'm a mechanical engineer, and ASME Y14.5 (the leading drafting standard in the west) requires the use of all capitol letters for technical drawings. Because of this, I use the CapsLock key very very frequently.
Removing the CapsLock key would piss off a lot of people in the hardware engineering world.
If lowercase letters aren’t permitted at all, then surely your technical drawing app would just shift everything to uppercase automatically (or at least provide an option to do so)?
I do. I typically have plenty of constants with descriptive names, and typing DESCRIPTIVE_NAME with a single hand is annoying.
As a side note I noticed that some keyboards implement CapsLock wrong: when CapsLock is on, pressing "9" should generate "9" and not ")". Otherwise it would be called ShiftLock, which is a lot less useful.
Why not just hold down one of the Shift keys while typing? That should be faster, considerably once underscores are involved, requiring only slight adjustments to typing technique, to use a ring finger where you would normally use a pinky.
(This is a genuine question, because I’m confused why one wouldn’t do it that way—I think it probably never even occurred to me to use Caps Lock for such a purpose, given that the modeless Shift key was right there.)
I find it mildly uncomfortable to hold shift while typing. And as there is a key for that purpose, which is in the same place on all keyboards, it seems more straightforward for me to use it for its intended purpose rather than something else. I’m not even sure what I would remap it to.
If you work with Kerberos, you might. Kerberos realm names are DNS-like, but up-cased. So the realm for news.ycombinator.com might be NEWS.YCOMBINATOR.COM or YCOMBINATOR.COM.
Normally I would just lock shift (sticky keys rock), but '.' happens in realm names, and shifting it isn't useful, so I use capslock for that.
That's about the only time I use capslock. Otherwise it's sticky keys all the way.
I recall reading somewhere that basically everyone does A/B testing absolutely wrong, which means it ends up being "coincidentally" always picking what the team wanted to pick anyway.
Honestly why does a foldable display seem like a good idea? It’s not. It’s crap. If you have any understanding of hardware whatsoever you’ll be able to devine why a foldable screen is going to fail in about 5 seconds and therefore is a bad idea.
On the face of it, foldable screens seem awesome. Like the future. Only problem is that they are still the future.
Caps Lock is a genuinely useless key: two-shift caps lock is a feature (on some OSes) whereby hitting both shifts toggles caps lock. You can free up that keycap for a brighter future, but still have your caps-lock functionality for when you need to scream at some identifiers.
Well... All of my keyboards have their capslocks keys remapped as escape. There literally hasn't been a capslock key on any of my keyboards for years. This has been a great boon to how I type.
Originally, I remapped the keys this way due to my macbook's touchbar that removed a functional escape key. The frequency is far higher for me to use escape than capslock, which I realized that I actually never used. When I need capitalization, I use the shift key.
The Alcatel One Touch Max DB[0] could receive SMS messages in upper and lowercase, but could only send in uppercase. I read through the whole manual at the time and there was nothing about it. Fond memories of always seeming like I was shouting at people in replies.
TBF things come and go. Imagine a world where nothing ever disappears whatever the usage patterns are.
Would you wish for you gas car engine to have kept a cranking port, as after all the battery could die and it’s more options that plugging a booster, right ?
Unfortunate title. I would be much happier if the capslock didn't. I have never, ever wanted to use capslock, and on e.g. livecds it is a big nuisance to need to fix it (CapsLock -> Ctrl) on every boot-up.
I curse the person who put the by-far least useful function on one of the most accessible keys, and bunged Ctrl down where it is out of easy reach. A pox on them!
> Computers now instantly boot up when plugged into the wall, and run until the plug is pulled. No more start-up time, the cases are aesthetically cleaner, and manufacturing cost is down at least a fraction of a dollar.
This is not futuristic, but actually retro. Some older computers (i.e. Sinclair ZX Spectrum) didn't have a power button at all.
And statistically, backspace is the second most used key (after the spacebar). I don’t understand why people remap caps-lock to control when it’s much closer to the hand than backspace and it’s much, MUCH less frequently used.
My main machine is a Macbook Pro and I find the control key to be in a fine position. Just curl the pinky down two rows. Backspace is much farther away.
I mean look, if you believe in abstractions at all, then sometimes (or always) interfaces need to hide things. Interfaces can be made too small for sure, but without a more principled argument on why any particular change is going too far, it seems way too easy to say "oh no someone made an interface smaller, the end is nigh!"
Though to be fair I guess the author's point is maybe that the arguments in the bug report are also insufficient if they could also be used to remove critical components. I'm not sure how much I agree with that, but I only glanced at the actual bug report.
I realize this is a more nuanced take on metric analysis, but the title just makes me remember that before I remapped caps lock, my most frequent use of it was to turn it back off when it had been accidentally pressed.
If I could remove a key from a full keyboard, it would be Num lock. Why does it exist? I can't think of any situation where you have a full num pad and don't want to use it.
I use it to check does OS kernel respond to a keyboard. When kernel is dead LED wouldn't switch state. I cannot use CapsLock, because I have no, I remapped it to a compose. I cannot use ScrollLock LED, because it reflects a chosen keyboard layout, and I believe it needs more than just healthy kernel to switch LED. But I never messed with NumLock, because I see no reason.
I'd remove Insert key. I regularly hit it by accident and I see no reason for insert-mode to exist except to annoy me.
I’m pretty happy we kept a ton of “dead” keys as they offer a flurry of options for more modifiers and shortcuts. The same way most people probably only use one of the Shift key, one of the Cmd key, etc. but it would be a shame to remove them. I’d see Num lock under the same light.
I went with Apple’s “international” layout just to have more keys to map.
If you enjoyed reading this, you may also appreciate the novel Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. As letters are banned in the story, they also are omitted in subsequent chapters.
I usually surgically disable my CAPS lock in registry or firmware settings -- most annoying mis-click ever for me -- I just hold down shift if I need to
We got some new Dell Laptops at work and they are configured to power on when you open the lid. There is a fingerprint sensor that I think is maybe supposed to be a power button, but it doesn't seem to work as a power button. Twice now the laptops have locked up (black screen, keyboard doesn't light up, etc...) and the old trick of holding the power button down for 10 seconds to hard power it off doesn't work. You have to disassemble the thing and unplug the batteries to get it to power off. Then it powers back on when you plug it back in and open the lid.
At least Apple's fingerprint/powerbutton key works correctly when held down for 10s. I can't believe there's not a way - oh wait, it's Dell of COURSE it'd be a bad copy of an ill-advised Apple feature.
There's always a non-software (hardware) fallback for powering off. The option to force a power-off using a multi-second hold is done purely in hardware.
Reminds me of ThinkPads old good seven row keyboard and the new six (DISASTER) row keyboard and a lot of changes from Apple with th Touchbar (++DISASTER).
Where is my context menu key? Why Fn+F4 doesn't suspend the machine anymore. Who regrouped the keys in this bad layout (Six Row Disaster). Somebody didn't understand the difference between clean design and useful design?
awesome article! I still remember switching back and forth from sun (and other unix) keyboards - ctrl and caps lock are reversed from today's standard 104.
I haven't used the caps-lock since then. Pinky just goes on the shift key TO TYPE ALL SHOUTY. I don't really know if pinky ever gets used fro letters in any case, but I think he doesn't so unless you need capital ctrl- something what's the problem?
Still it does also feel like the problem of designers that like to use the tail to wag the dog to justify yet another unnecessary change is just all too realistic.
I type on ErgoDox Infinity keyboards and I don't have a caps-lock. It was a bit irritating so I switched from Java to Go to avoid capitalized constants and I'm happy again!
I'm too lazy to deal with remapping it, so I typically pry the caps lock key off my keyboards. My kids always say that my keyboard is broken and try to fix it...
Fn-delete, yes. Honestly I find this nicer than using a separate key (which also exists on the larger Apple keyboards with numpads), but to each their own.
It's mostly about the difficulty in actually interpreting data. It's very easy to construct an experiment that influences behavior to make a feature seem useful or useless. Intentionally or accidentally.
Science has known this for a long time. Designers seem intent on having to rediscover this on their own.
I think this goes to show that lots of data-driven processes are anything but - the data is amoral and does what you tell it to do - or finally confesses after enough torture.
Telemetry says feature isn't used hardly at all? Means we need to promote this feature (in the case of ads, perhaps)! Or it could mean we can remove it entirely, in the case of Mozilla.
In the end it's just used to confirm what we wanted to do anyway.
It's actually one my favorites, just remap it to CTRL or something similar and bam! You have one of the most ergonomically accessible modifier keys, much better than stretching your pinky all the time.
I found it pretty useful to do both. A quick press is esc while holding it down is ctrl. I do find caps lock useful enough to keep it around still, so hitting left shift + right shift toggles that.
How about the Pause button? It almost never pauses anything when you press it.
Even on big things that have had hundreds of developers it is never considered. Try hitting the pause button while watching a video on YouTube for example. Nothing happens. Try hitting it in any major video game. There are a scant handful that recognise it. It is a forgotten key.
If the simulation is shoddy it’s even more infuriating though.
On MacOS if I remap a key, it gets remapped for everything. I suppose the remapping is done before applications get the keystroke. Even if I connect to a remote computer, it’s getting the remapped keystroke.
On Linux, it’s just locally. On a remote system, the original keystroke is passed. The only way to get around that is with a programmable keyboard. But then your laptop keyboard doesn’t work the way you expect.
There's utilities like keyd and kmonad to remap keys system wide on Linux. I've used keyd because the config is simpler for what I want. Works in tty, X11, remote. Also does layers and other fancy tricks.
I was able to remap keys per keyboard on MacOS somehow ... can't quite recall how I did it (used it to remap command and windows key on the external but not the laptop keyboard).
Yeah, I've used that, but MacOS has the modifier keys built in now - System Preferences -> Modifier Keys - Caps, Control, Option, Command, Function are all there.
Have you ever played FPS games? Caps lock is usually used as a switch for silent/stealth movement, probably because it is one of the only buttons on Windows which keep state.
It's because it's right next to WASD. The state in Windows doesn't matter, if you enter games with it enabled you don't start the game in stealth mode. Like all other toggleables in games (menus, maps, aiming) it's based on input events toggling a state variable which is why it still works when you rebind stealth to a non-stateful key like ctrl or shift.
"For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld."