The Optimus was quite hot in the gadget lovers’ circles, which is rather strange, because gadget lovers think that they are too cool for any languages except English, and i can hardly imagine this keyboard being really useful to anybody except linguists. Unfortunately, it costs over $2,000, and that’s the kind of money that linguists usually don’t have.

I thought that since the tablet computers with on-screen keyboards are the hottest thing in the world now, there won’t be a new version of the Optimus keyboard. Apparently, i was wrong: Art.Lebedev is taking pre-orders for the “Optimus Popularis“, a cheaper version of “Optimus Maximus”. It is cheaper, because it has less display keys.

Relatively cheaper – it still costs over a thousand dollars, for which one could buy two good tablets or three netbooks. But what’s much worse is that it doesn’t have PageUp, PageDown, Home and End keys.

Quite possibly the designers of Optimus Popularis conducted a research and found that few people actually use these keys. Quite possibly it’s even true. But i use them all the time, and will be absolutely unable to use a keyboard that doesn’t have them for more than a minute.

That’s because these keys are an essential part of my writing experience. I need quick ways to go back and forth, to the beginning and to the end of the document and of the line. Otherwise i am unable to write.

So no, i don’t want an Optimus Popularis keyboard, even for much less money. I just won’t use it. I can hardly imagine anyone who will use it seriously.

This was the first in a series of posts about writing in computers.

I write a lot of email, blog posts and Wikipedia articles and this keyboard shortcut is essential for me, so if it doesn’t work correctly in a program, i simply cannot use it and will use the competitor, in my case Firefox. Since i love Firefox anyway, it was not really a problem for me.

It took more than two years to do it, but this bug is more or less solved now and the fix will probably be released soon. I am now trying a preliminary version and the Ctrl-arrow shortcut seems to work correctly. However, as i expected, i quickly found other problems because of which i cannot use Google Chrome. Long story short, i cannot write Russian there. It’s not that it’s impossible – it’s just way too hard for me.

I could enable the Russian keyboard layout in my operating system, but it would be very hard to use for me. Keyboards sold in my country usually come with Latin and Hebrew letters printed on the keys and not Russian. It’s possible to buy a keyboard with Russian letters on it, and i did it once, but it didn’t help me much. You see, i write Russian several times a day, but less often than i write Hebrew or English, and the Russian layout is very different from the Latin layout, so i type in it very slowly even if i have the letters in front of my eyes.

Since 2006 my solution for this issue was the Transliterator add-on for Firefox, created by Alex Benenson (thank you so much, Alex). It was first called “ToCyrillic”, because it only helped with the Cyrillic alphabet, but later it was adapted to many other languages. It allows me to type Russian phonetically, so the Latin ‘b’ is automatically converted to Cyrillic ‘б’, ‘sh’ becomes ‘ш’ etc. It works everywhere in Firefox – websites’ input fields, the address bar, the dialog windows etc.

I couldn’t find anything like it for Chrome. It’s possible that i didn’t look well enough, but the add-ons i did find that claimed to do transliteration, phonetic typing or keyboard emulation either did something completely different or asked me to allow the add-on access my data on all websites and my tabs and browsing activity. I don’t understand why such an add-on would need access to my data and browsing activity – it is only supposed to translate the characters i type into other characters and forget it.

It’s possible that the message that tells me about these privacy implications is over-zealous and the add-ons in question don’t actually breach my privacy, but it is still weird to see them, so i didn’t install them.

So there – i still have a strong reason not to move to Google Chrome. It’s not really Google’s fault. In fact, i could myself develop an extension that does something that i want – the source and the API are open and it’s probably not a lot of work. But why would i waste even a minute of my time doing such a thing if i already have Firefox and its Transliterator add-on that work perfectly well? You could say that Google Chrome is faster and uses less memory; it is not quite true in the first place, and even if it would be true, i wouldn’t care about it, because being able to write the language i want is far more important than minor differences in performance.

As a side note, in some Google websites it’s possible to type in transliteration. However, it works only on these particular sites and needs the machine to be online, because it uses a web service to translate every word. That is weird software design and has rather unacceptable privacy implications.

Wikipedia already has phonetic typing support in Malayalam, Tamil and other languages and soon it is going to be deployed to other languages. It works in-place – it translates the text immediately in the browser letter by letter. Of course, it only works in one website; it would be better to help people to enable their native keyboard layouts rather than do it in only one website, but apparently doing it this way helps people start writing and searching immediately. More details on that soon.

The Hackasaurus mascot

Hackasaurus is a set of software tools and workflows to teach young people web programming. Its technical centerpiece, the “X-Ray Goggles”, is a tool that works similarly to Firebug and Google Chrome Developer tools: it helps the user examine and change, or “remix”, the inner workings of a web page – the structure of HTML elements and CSS styles. It has less features than the above tools, but it is designed to have just enough to get average people started with understanding web technologies. It is also laughably easy to install: it’s not even an add-on – you only need to add a bookmark.

According to the Hackasaurus creators Jess Klein and Atul Varma, even though the tool was intended for children, it is being used for learning about web technologies by people of all ages who were curious about web development, but found other HTML tutorials too hard.

And it works not just in Firefox, but in other browsers, too. That is one more example of how the Mozilla movement is not just about Firefox, but about Loving the web.

Hackasaurus can be easily translated to other languages using Pootle. I already translated most of it to Hebrew. Special thanks to Atul for creating the page dev.hksr.us which is frequently updated with the translations in progress – it is essential for testing the localized version. For example, i can see that the right-to-left directionality of Hackasaurus in Hebrew must still be fixed – i hope to find the time to do it myself as soon as possible.

And most importantly, i am thinking of using the tool to start teaching web development in a fun way in the schools in my area. This has been done successfully in Barcelona, New York, Brighton, Nairobi and other places and i plan to add Jerusalem and Haifa to this list soon.

MozCamp Berlin 2011 WorldReady

• Vito Smolej from Slovenia gave two important talks about Translation Memory, especially in OmegaT. Translation Memory is barely used in Mozilla localization projects, even though it could make things much more efficient and Vito showed some ways in which it could be employed.
• Jean-Bernard Marcon from France talked about the state of the BabelZilla site, which is used to translate Mozilla add-ons. Gladly, i didn’t have to tell him that despite the impressive amount of localizations that are done at that site, it is very problematic because of numerous technical issues – he said himself that he’s well aware of them and is going to replace the software completely Real Soon Now. I found it a little strange, however, that Jean-Bernard is happy about using the site for translating only Mozilla add-ons and doesn’t want to extend it to any other projects – say, Firefox itself. Oh well, as long as he maintains the add-ons site well, i’m happy.
• Chris Hofmann and Jeff Beatty gave a great presentation about the present and the future of organizing localization groups and communicating about it. Frankly, it’s not all that i hoped to hear, but i’m really happy just to know that Mozilla, like Wikimedia, now has a guy whose job is to communicate about localization.

And i gave a talk that compares the localization of Mozilla and MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia. The slides are here. Many people who attended it said that it was bold of me to say these rather negative things about Mozilla. It is somewhat true – it is quite bold of me to use the first major Mozilla event i attend as a bully pulpit to promote my other project, but the talk was generally well-received. I believe that i succeeded at making my point: Both Mozilla and MediaWiki are leaders in the world of massively localized Free Software and both projects have things to learn from each other – Mozilla can simplify its translation workflow and consider converging its currently sprawling tools and procedures, as it is in MediaWiki, and MediaWiki can learn a lot from Mozilla about building the localization teams as communities of people and about quality control.

Finally, i was very glad to meet Dwayne Bailey and Alexandru Szasz – developers of Pootle and Narro, two localization tools used in the Mozilla world. Talking to them was very interesting and inspiring – they both understand well the importance of localization and the shortcomings of the current tools, including the ones that they are developing, and they are keen on fixing them. As a result of this excellent meeting i completed the translation of Pootle itself into Hebrew. And there is more to come.

In the past i participated in small events of the Israeli Mozilla community, but this was my first major Mozilla-centric event.

MozCamp Berlin 2011 group photo. Notice the fox on the left and yours truly on the right.

The biggest thing that i take from this event is the understanding that i belong to this community of people who love the web. I never properly realized it earlier; i somehow thought that loving the web is a given. It is not.

Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox Engineering repeated the phrase “we <3 the web” several times in his keynote speech. And this is the thing that makes the Mozilla community special.

Firefox is not the only good web browser. Opera and Google Chrome are reasonably good, too. Frankly, they are even better than Firefox in some features, though i find them less essential.

Firefox is not the only web browser that strives to implement web standards. Opera, Google Chrome and even recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer try to do that, too.

Firefox is not even the only web browser that is Free Software. So is Chromium.

But Firefox and the Mozilla community around it love the web. I don’t really have a solid way to explain it – it’s mostly a feeling. And with other browsers i just don’t have it. They help people surf the web, but they aren’t in the business of loving it.

And this is important, because the Internet is not just a piece of technical infrastructure that helps people communicate, do business and find information and entertainment. The Internet is a culture in itself – worthy of appreciation in itself and worthy of love in itself – and the Mozilla community is there to make it happen.

Some people would understand from this that Firefox is for the nerds who care about the technology more than they care about going out every once in a while. It isn’t. It’s not, in fact, just about a browser. It’s about the web – more and more Mozilla is not just developing a great browser, but also technologies and trends that affect all users of all browsers, rather than target markets. By using Firefox you get as close as you can to the cutting edge, not just of cool new features, but of openness and equality. Some people may find this ideology boring and pointless; i find it important, because without it the Internet would not be where it is today. Imagine an Internet in which the main sites you visiting every day are not Facebook, Wikipedia, Google and your favorite blogs, but msn.com… and nothing but msn.com. Without Mozilla that’s how the Internet would probably look today. Without Mozilla something like this may well happen in the future.

Thanks a lot to William Quiviger, Pierros Papadeas, Greg Jost and all the other hard-working people who produced this great event.

More about it in the next couple of posts very soon.

There is however, a test TLD in Hebrew: “טעסט”. (That’s the word “test” in Hebrew characters and according to Yiddish spelling rules.)

And there’s even an actual working domain in it: http://דוגמה.טעסט. That can be translated as “example.test”. The TLD “טעסט” now appears to the left of “דוגמה”, which is the name, because Hebrew is written right-to-left.

And what happens if you use your browser to go to that domain? It redirects you to http://דוגמה.טעסט/עמוד_ראשי. That string in the end (or in the middle if you will) is the standard Hebrew title of a MediaWiki main page, which you can also see on the Hebrew Wikipedia. The hypothesis that MediaWiki is installed there is proven further by using Google site search on the same domain: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:דוגמה.טעסט. Something in the installation is probably broken, because the pages appear blank, but the page titles can only mean one thing: MediaWiki is, or was, being used to test a Hebrew domain name.

(This post is based on information from Tomer Cohen of Mozilla Israel.)

However, if you, like most people, write documents in other languages and scripts, you’ll usually need to choose different fonts for different languages. Some fonts include more than one script, but very few fonts include all the scripts.

Now, to specify non-Latin fonts you first need to enable support for this in your word processor, because developers of word processors assume that most people write in only one language:

LibreOffice language settings dialog. Without getting into details, the corresponding box in Microsoft Word is similar.

After you’ve done this you’ll see a slightly different font selection dialog – now you can select the font for “Western text”, “Asian text” and “CTL text”:

LibreOffice character formatting dialog. Again, the corresponding dialog in Microsoft Word is similar.

This is wrong in every possible regard.

The simplest problem with this is that most people have no idea what “CTL” is. Microsoft Word calls this “Complex scripts”, and the C in CTL indeed stands for “Complex”, but most people are not supposed to know what “complex scripts” are either.

Furthermore, according to this weird division of the world’s languages, Hindi and Arabic are “complex”, but Japanese is “Asian”, even though Hindi and Arabic are also spoken in Asia. This is most probably a result of the ways Americans describe immigrants: The Chinese and the Japanese are “Asian Americans”, but Indians and Arabs are “Indian” and “Middle Eastern”.

This is preposterous. It pestered me really badly ever since i used Microsoft Word for the first time in 1997, but somehow i never bothered to complain. So here i am, finally complaining about this atrocity.

“Complex scripts” is a very old-fashioned term that survived from the time when more or less anything that wasn’t Latin was considered “complex”. More precisely, it was used for scripts that were not just rows of letters like Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, but required connected letters like Arabic, ligatures like most scripts of India and its neighbors, or right-to-left text, like Hebrew and, again, Arabic. According to this logic, Latin and Greek should be quite complex, too, since most languages written in these scripts require combinations of diacritics, like in the Lithuanian word “rūgščių̃”… but this never bothered the programmers of word processors.

So this term, “complex”, was used by programmers, and even that was hardly justified. It was never meant to be used by ordinary people. A person who writes Arabic is not supposed to know that his script is “complex”, because as far as he’s concerned it’s the simplest script there is. In fact, it’s quite insulting. And most of all, it’s hard to understand: When a person wants to select a font for Arabic text, the most logical thing to ask him is to specify an “Arabic font” – not a “complex font”.

But beyond the strange terminology there’s an even worse practical problem. Let’s say that i got used to the fact that Microsoft and LibreOffice call my script “complex”; but what if i have more than one “complex” language in my document? It’s not an edge case at all. Lately i’ve been reading–and making little edits to–a Word document, which is a grammar textbook of the Malayalam language for Hebrew-speaking students. Hebrew and Malayalam are both “complex”, but they are complex for entirely different reasons, and they need different fonts. The author of that document told me that it drove her nuts. I completely understand what was she talking about–she’s just one among millions of people who suffer from this… but for some reason not one of them complains.

The relatively convenient way to solve this problem with the current software is to use separate character styles for different “complex” languages, but most people don’t know at all what “character styles” are and even for those who know what they are this solution would be very inefficient.

So how font selection dialogs should really be done? They should treat each combination of language and script separately. This is a bit tricky, but only a bit.

The best place to start solving this would be to look at existing standards: ISO 15924, ISO 639 and the IANA Language subtag registry. ISO 15924 lists a few dozens of scripts; ISO 639 lists a few thousands of languages; the IANA Language subtag registry defines the rules for specifying combinations of languages, scripts and their varieties. Combinations are important, because it’s not enough to specify a “Latin” font or a “Serbian language”: Serbian can be written in Latin and Cyrillic, Azeri can be written in Latin, Cyrillic and Arabic–in which case its direction changes, too, etc.

This doesn’t mean at all that the font selection dialogs have to list thousands of combinations of languages and scripts. By default they should list a few languages that a user is expected to use, for example by looking which keyboard layouts the user has enabled in his operating system. And the user must be able to add more languages, by using some kind of an “Add” or “+” button: “I want to write Malayalam in this document; sometimes i want to do this in the Malayalam script in the Meera font, and sometimes i want to write it in IPA, which is a kind of a Latin script and then i want to do it in the Charis font.” In this scenario two lines would have to be added to the dialog using that add button.

There may be more clever ways to solve this problem, but at this stage my proposal is certainly better than grouping the world’s languages into three arbitrary and outdated groups.

Now where does Wikimedia come in? Wikimedia projects, the most popular of which is Wikipedia, are massively multilingual. That’s why the Wikimedia Foundation always took internationalization seriously and recently created a whole team dedicated to it–a team of which i am proud to be a member. One of the most important and urgent things that this team does is adding web fonts support to our websites, so that people wouldn’t see squares or question marks when they see a word in a language for which they don’t have a font on their computer.

The intention is to do it with orientation to languages and scripts, as described above. Even though a lot of people edit Wikipedia, it is still a website that is mostly read and not written by its visitors, so the fonts that will be used will be mostly decided by the programmers–that is, by our team–, but word processors are mostly used by people for writing, so they should combine language and script selection with manual font selection. Of course, providing good defaults would be a good idea.

Now all that’s left is for some LibreOffice developer to pick up the bug i opened about it and fix it, thus making LibreOffice far more friendly to the world than Microsoft Word is. After all, there are many more people who don’t speak English than those who do.

Three things made me write this post: The work of my team in Wikimedia on WebFonts and especially the work of Santhosh Thottingal; My Malayalam classes with Ophira Gamliel; and Lior Kaplan‘s and Caolán McNamara‘s questions about the font selection dialog in LibreOffice. Thank you, Santhosh, Ophira, Lior and Caolán for making me finally write this post, which i wanted to write for about fourteen years.

Jews Kick Ass. Henry Winkler, Albert Einstein, Sammy Davis Jr., Jesus, William Shatner, Bob Dylan

If you search for “differences between”, you’ll get this list:

The top spot belongs to “Differences between editions of Dungeons & Dragons” and that shouldn’t be surprising: the article “List of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition monsters” only recently lost its first place in the list of the longest English Wikipedia articles by number of bytes to “‎2011 ITF Men’s Circuit” (it’s something in tennis).

Out of ten suggestions, six are related to languages. American and British English are considered one language, but everybody admits that it has many variations by pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary and many other parameters, and lots of people love to bicker about the spelling of “meter” and “aluminum”. Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are one language that has different names for reasons that are more political than linguistic. Something similar can probably be said about Malaysian and Indonesian, Norwegian Bokmål and Standard Danish and Scottish Gaelic and Irish, but i know very little about these pairs.

Spanish and Portuguese are related, but definitely separate and mostly mutually unintelligible languages. It’s been said that it is easier for Portuguese speakers to understand Spanish speakers than the other way around, which is interesting, but it doesn’t really justify an encyclopedic article, as in the other cases. In fact, i am somewhat surprised that “Differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese dialects” is not in the list, given the huge number of arguments about it in the Portuguese – sorry, Lusophone – Wikipedia.

“Butterflies and moths” is probably the most serious article in this list, but that’s probably because i’m not a Biologist.

And the last two articles are about movies (James Bond – movies vs. novels) and religion (Codex Sinaiticus vs. Vaticanus), which is also very Wikipedia, the encyclopedia about which someone said that it has more stamp collectors than good writers. (Citation needed; I can’t find the original quote.)

What the world does need is more blog posts about the great ideas that grew in the little hallway conversations there. One of the things that i discussed with many people at Wikimania is what i call The Software Localization Paradox. That’s an idea that has been bothering me for about a year. I tried to look for other people who wrote about it online and couldn’t find anything.

Like any other translation, software localization is best done by people who know well both the original language in which the software interface was written – usually English, and the target language. People who don’t know English strongly prefer to use software in a language they know. If the software is not available in their language, they will either not use it at all or will have to memorize lots of otherwise meaningless English strings and locations of buttons. People who do know English often prefer to use software in English even if it is available in their native language. The two most frequent explanations for that is that the translation is bad and that people who want to use computers should learn English anyway. The problem is that for various reasons lots of people will never learn English even if it would be mandatory in schools and useful for business. They will have to suffer the bad translations and will have no way to fix it.

I’ve been talking to people at Wikimania about this, especially people from India. (I also spoke to people from Thailand, Russia, Greece and other countries, but Indians were the biggest group.) All of them knew English and at least one language of India. The larger group of Indian Wikipedians to whom i spoke preferred English for most communication, especially online, even if they had computers and mobile phones that supported Indian languages; some of them even preferred to speak English at home with their families. They also preferred reading and writing articles in the English Wikipedia. The second, smaller, group preferred the local language. Most of these people also happened to be working on localizing software, such as MediaWiki and Firefox.

So this is the paradox – to fix localization bugs, someone must notice them, and to notice them, more people who know English must use localized software, but people who know English rarely use localized software. That’s why lately i’ve been evangelizing about it. Even people who know English well should use software in their language – not to boost their national pride, but to help the people who speak that language and don’t know English. They should use the software especially if it’s translated badly, because they are the only ones who can report bugs in the translation or fix the bugs themselves.

(A side note: Needless to say, Free Software is much more convenient for localization, because proprietary software companies are usually too hard to even approach about this matter; they only pay translators if they have a reason to believe that it will increase sales. This is another often overlooked advantage of Free Software.)

I am glad to say that i convinced most people to whom i spoke about it at Wikimania to at least try to use Firefox in their native language and taught them where to report bugs about it. I also challenged them to write at least one article in the Wikipedia in their own language, such as Hindi, Telugu or Kannada – as useful as the English Wikipedia is to the world, Telugu Wikipedia is much more useful for people who speak Telugu, but no English. I already saw some results.

I am now looking for ideas and verifiable data to develop this concept further. What are the best strategies to convince people that they should use localized software? For example: How economically viable is software localization? What is cheaper for an education department of a country – to translate software for schools or to teach all the students English? Or: How does the absence of localized software affect different geographical areas in Africa, India, the Middle East?

Any ideas about this are very welcome.

I do have something very nice to say about it – it has an excellent interface for reporting bugs. You simply click the problematic area on the screen, write a description and submit the report. It is very buggy on Firefox, but i can understand that, too, hoping that they will fix it. It does work well in Google Chrome, but i can’t really use it, because Chrome’s right-to-left editing support is very bad. The sad thing is that after the report is submitted i don’t have a way to know what happens to it. Public bug tracking is one of the most common, most appealing, and most overlooked features of Free Software. However, reporting bugs in Free Software projects is a relatively hard process – the interface of bug tracking software such as Bugzilla is intimidating and lots of people don’t even know that they can use it.

I hope that Free Software web frameworks such as MediaWiki (Wikipedia’s engine), WordPress and Drupal, will adopt a similar model for reporting bugs and combine it with the already excellent concept of public bug tracking. If that would be Google+’s contribution to the web, it would be enough to say that it doesn’t suck.