The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

4 hours ago by dang

Discussed at the time:

The curious case of disappearing Polish S - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8986920 - Feb 2015 (117 comments)

3 hours ago by rkangel

Surely this is down to one key error (pun intended) - Medium deciding to override a standard browser shortcut 'for the good of their users'. If they needed a manual save function then I might understand it, but they tried to be clever and made things worse in a subtle way.

5 hours ago by jan_Inkepa

That's a really well-written blogpost! I was expecting it to be much more surface-level (something to do with character codes - still possibly interesting!) but it had new info for me on several levels (the background of the bug, and the personal history stuff didn't feel too fillery to me).

4 hours ago by Bluecobra

I’m glad that they actually fixed the issue instead of just deciding to use a workaround, like copy/paste Ś from another application.

3 hours ago by hawski

I wonder if it is a similar reason why currently on MS Teams I can't type the letter ń.

5 hours ago by karatinversion

Taking “5 why’s” to a whole new level!

4 hours ago by thenewwazoo

    e.metaKey || (e.ctrlKey && !e.altKey)

seems to me like an exceptionally strange choice. Why not an exclusive-or? The thing they want to avoid is a false-positive on both being pressed, so test for that directly.

4 hours ago by LordDragonfang

e.metaKey is the `⌘Command` key on Mac (used for the save shortcut), an entirely different key than the ones involved in the bug.

Also, Javascript doesn't have a logical xor operator, so trying to do that would potentially reduce readability.

3 hours ago by smlckz

> Also, Javascript doesn't have a logical xor operator, so trying to do that would potentially reduce readability.

I also didn't know about any operator to logically xor two boolean variables (thought about (ab)using JavaScript's implicit type conversion mechanisms: `x ^ y`), and then I learnt that `!=` works fine as a logical xor for booleans. Tada!

I don't know how much readability is reduced by this.

3 hours ago by joshuaissac

> Javascript doesn't have a logical xor operator

x != y

3 hours ago by dhosek

Although with the looseness around booleans in JS, I'd imagine that you might need to do something more like `(x==true) != (y==true)`

4 hours ago by zamadatix

Wouldn't using XOR trigger a save on Alt + S? Unless I'm missing something with why the meta portion should have the XOR here instead.

4 hours ago by SSLy

Meanwhile Cisco Webex still exhibits this bug

4 hours ago by tomaszs

An interesting fact for non Polish speaking readers: for non-official writing we often don't use diacritic characters at all. It makes writing faster. With the raise of spell checkers it fades out, but still, if you write without diacritics often you will be well understood.

Second interesting fact: it is very popular for software and online apps, especially not developed in Europe to ignore diacritics. Not only polish ones, but also french, german etc. You get weird characters instead or can not write properly altogether. I hope the article will put a highlight on the issue.

3 hours ago by 988747

Sure, but sometimes leaving out Polish diacritics makes the whole sentence ambiguous, or at the very least harder to read. I personally despise people doing that.

More to the article's point: there were countless times where I accidentaly sent unfinished email by trying to type "ś".

3 hours ago by dhosek

It's surprising how much software (mostly on Windows) doesn't properly handle Unicode in 2021. With something working in Unicode, it's not that big of a deal to both handle letters like Ł or ż and also to run normalization on text strings so that you can (if desired) treat Łódź and Lodz as identical (e.g., for text searching).

2 hours ago by bobbylarrybobby

Just a note that normalization is not the same as diacritic insensitivity. Normalization is the process by which strings that are semantically equivalent (by some standard), yet have different underlying byte sequences, are transformed to have the same underlying byte sequence. For instance, replacing “e, combining acute accent” with “e with acute accent”.

3 hours ago by crazygringo

I feel like that's pretty true worldwide for languages with diacritics, at least for all the Latin-script languages I'm familiar with.

It's really no different from people in English shortening "you" to "u" in texting as well, or "lol". Everybody saves keystrokes wherever they can.

2 hours ago by danijelb

It's popular for some reason even in countries where it doesn't save keystrokes. For example in Croatia we have 5 characters with diacritics (š, đ, č, ć, ž), all of them have dedicated keys on the keyboard and yet many people have a habit of simply not using them.

3 hours ago by inglor_cz

Czechs sometimes write without diacritics as well, but the resulting ambiguities are funny.

For example, a customer of my e-shop gave his street as "Skretova".

So, is it "Škrétova" (named after a famous Baroque painter) or "Skřetova" (Goblin's street?)

Of course, most Czech cities do not honor goblins in their street plan...