Defaults

[Koblinger Egmont]

Hi,

On 23 Jul 2003, Joe Klemmer wrote:

> > There's an icon for gvim, the arrow next to it brings other editors.
> > There's an icon for mozilla, the arrow next to it brings other network
> > software.
> > There's a paint icon for gimp, the arrow next to it offers xmms and
> > mplayer. It isn't too logical.
>
> 	This is just a default setting and has nothing to do with what ends up
> in the menus.  Mine don't look anything like the default.

I wasn't talking about menus (I didn't even mention this word), as the
Subject: shows I'm talking about the defaults. Of course I can customize
everything, I just wanted to point out an inconsistency in the default.


> 	Dillo rocks!  It's the best and fastest browser for reading
> documentation or dealing with simple web sites like those made by


I see a lot of people here like dillo.

No doubt: it's far one of the fastest browsers, which is really nice. I do
accept if iso8859-1-speaking people say it's their favourite one. My
mother tounge is 8859-2. Accents are displayed incorrectly, since dillo
doesn't choose a -2 charset even if the document tells it to do. If
someone wants to, I can send a screenshot of an utf-8 encoded page, but I
guess you can imagine the results: it is shown as 8859-1, making it
completely unreadable, while it's perfect in nearly all other browsers.

If we were around 1997, I'd say dillo is the best browser available. But
the world has changed a lot since then, and internationalization has
become a very important issue, IMHO much more important than startup time.
The world is moving towards i18n, UTF-8, and XFce is moving this way too.
IMHO if XFce wants to be a good desktop environment with good default
setting for everyone, not just those who speak 8859-1, then it shouldn't
by default offer an application which mishandles all non-8859-1 charsets.

I know it is very hard to accept this argument for everyone who uses
8859-1 and has never seen any troubles with accents. I've seen a lot. Not
in mozilla, galeon, epiphany, konqueror, opera, links -g, but in a lots of
other appliactions, including dillo.

How does the gtk1 vs. gtk2 question arise? I really don't care if an
application is gtk1 or gtk2 as long as is does the correct thing (even
though I prefer AA fonts of gtk2). gtk1 doesn't provide any functions for
correct multilanguage support, hence one can hardly see gtk1 apps that
handle character sets correctly. (There are exceptions, e.g. firebird 0.6
or sylpheed 0.9 are said to show correct characters, I haven't tested
them), but this needs a huge amont of extra work from the programmers.
However, gtk2+pango offers you correct displaying of any characters
without bothering with them, so gtk2 application do everything correctly
without taking care of them and coding many days for it. That's why in
general gtk1 applications suck while gtk2 do it the right way. There are
rare exceptions on both sides, and I really wouldn't talk against dillo if
it was an exception amongst the gtk1 apps which handled accents correctly.



bye,

Egmont