From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Wed May 11 2005 - 04:54:15 CDT
At 02:48 +0200 2005/05/11, JFC (Jefsey) Morfin wrote:
>At 00:08 11/05/2005, Hans Aberg wrote:
>>What I mean is that it might not healthy expecting te computer
>>keyboard input to be able to supply the needed context in each key.
>>It might be faster to enter French without accents, letting the
>>computer software figuring them out, while retaining the ability to
>>enter them in special case by more complicated key combinations.
>
>OK. But this is not what I am thinking of. I am thinking about
>industrial applications and legal obligation to support the users
>langages of the concerned area. I took the example of French not
>being fully supported by keyboards, only to document the difficulty
>Donald might face with languages of a region of Africa.
The legal obligations method has often trouble to get working with
computers, the latter which evolve so fast.
>Innovation is pushed by sales necessity. If pemit to sell is granted
>only if matching the demands of the users of reasonable size market,
>innovation will come.
As you point out, it is important to find some solutions that really
work. Then people will start using them.
>Donald's suggestion on led based keyboard is a good one. This calls
>for two efforts. The key technology and the key content tables. To
>call for the industrial key technology, R&D teams must feel secure
>charsets have been established and documented (to define the number
>of keys for example). The same for the law makers.
The reason I am sceptical about keyboards with LED's/LCD's on the
keys is that there is a development principle that speaks against it:
In the long term, products are promoted having fewer mechanical
components. By contrast, the number of transistors on a chip is
mainly limited by development costs. Once those have been paid, a
chip costs about the same regardless whether it has many or few
transistors. So fly-by-wire airplanes has a long term development
advantage over mechanically controlled ones. The same the applies to
keyboards.
>Today, we can certainly start working/testing about charsets in
>using touch screens as you describe it. There are enough industrial
>and security issues involved to justify R&D and prototypes if there
>is a clear doctrine. In rough and secure, or vital environments the
>touch screen issue you desribe are no problem. It is here vital
>there is no possible hacking and errors. Very limited charsets are
>of the essence: telephone numbers, upper cases, etc.
So touch screen type keyboards should have a long term advantage over
mechanical keyboards with LED's/LCD's one the keys, provided the
feeling feedback to the human problem can be solved.
>For example I need a table of all the numbers (0-9) in every script
>for directly entering IP addresses and converting them and only
>them. Such a table should exist in the 102 scripts?
>jfc
With the Ukelele suggestion, I have started thinking a bit on
keyboard character layouts for math. Then I would want to have more
modifier keys for the Math Alphanumeric Symbols. For the other math
symbols, there is a real problem trying to find logical positions.
-- Hans Aberg
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