à ≠ a (unless à = a)

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/02/25 04:21 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/02/25/1756443.aspx

This is for the most part completely by design, since there is a very elemental truth that

It is a challenge to balance on Windows the needs of users who want these distinctions to not be present and the ones who do (some in the latter group can even get quite offended by the abuse of language that ignoring the distinction appears to be, to them!).

One could argue that in search it makes sense to have the ability to ignore these distinctions as an option, irregardless of whether it is allowed in ordering or non-search identity questions. And indeed this is a very sensible idea for a search algorithm to consider, as an option. It is available in some applications such as Microsoft Word, and obviously it can be used programmatically in both managed and unmanaged code if you call the real collation functions from the NLS API or the SystemGlobalization namespace....

This post brought to you by à (U+00e0, a.k.a. LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE)

Irregardless? ;-)

In regards the post, I would personally say that diacritics matter, being there because they are actually different letters, except for in the case of searching where letting people be lazy can be a very nice thing to do.

Also, my first post on this blog despite reading it for a looong time now :-)

In a way, I think it's better that Vista doesn't find été or marché... I like a simple system than something that does too many things automatically that in the end we don't want. It is often very annoying to change a set-up that is automatically doing something that we don't want. Let's keep it simple, user-friendly!

I think the current behaviour is rational and sound. I live in Sweden, so we have these odd characters 'å', 'ä', and 'ö'. Yet I don't know a single person who would ever replace them with 'a' and 'o', because those are considered ENTIRELY DIFFERENT LETTERS. This is even reflected in the sort order, where 'åäö' comes at the very end of the alphabet.

Furthermore, some Swedish words actually turn into completely different ones, with a different meaning, if you substitute 'åä' för 'a' and/or 'ö' för 'o'. So it would definitely be a bug if Windows/.NET allowed you to mix these up.

While native users of a language might not consider replacing them, other language users may be trying to locate text with diacritics, especially using keyboards that they are not familiar with, or simply being unaware of how to compose with dead keys.

(I was at a hotel in the north of Sweden earlier this month, and watched a number of tourists struggling to use the lobby computer because they had never stuck a keyboard requiring an Alt-Gr key before, and couldn't get to the @ symbol).

In addition, these words may get borrowed into English (say) without the diacritics and it's very useful to have the option to be diacritic-blind in the search for complete coverage. While my French is very imperfect I actually use a web-search on the unaccented form of a word to locate how the accents should properly appear. I can't do that with rigid searches.

Consider also that Microsoft software applications may be auto-correcting your text to accented/diacritic form even though you may not have a clue how to apply those manually. Two examples would be 1) Word which has for years done cafe->café; and 2) the Windows Media Player library function which may overwrite your MP3 file names and metadata with (the true) accented forms of song-titles. As it stands you cannot locate these files anymore with the accent-free search.

So "simple" for one language user, is not for others.

I should also add - from much recent experience booking hotels around Northern and Eastern Europe - that URLs often remove all the diacritics, so if I was searching for all instances of the name of a place, I would not find both the accented form and the "internet form" in a bookmark/favourite or list of web resources.

To pick a Swedish example, the website for the island of Djurgården is www.djurgarden.net

Thanks for publishing !!

This have been corrected : in control panel if I type reseau i find results

BUT

the results are not the same as if I type réseau !!! and different from "network" too

That's sounds very strange.

I also have to tell that I really loves your previous presentatuon in 2005, I was very frustrated not to continue to talk and exchange with your team this year :-(