by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/12/20 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/12/20/10249596.aspx
New ways to support input are really all the rage these days - from IMEs to new IMEs to the soft keyboards of Windows 8 to the Swypes and Swipe Its and Sliders and Touch pals and Shape Writers and so on.
Technically I am not connected to any of these efforts, even as I Continue to crank out new keyboard layouts for Windows (e.g. What language is that keyboard for?, Behind the Cherokee Phonetic layout in Windows 8, and others).
Though I end up at least indirectly connected o most of them, since no matter how little they resemble hardware keyboards they all tend to sit atop keyboards.
And thus they need to interact with this venerable way to get text entered in by users.
My inbox regularly sees questions pop about some of the new things that don't work properly because of unanticipated design limitations in the support underneath!
In theory such issues could be considered bugs. But since in general the design works on all these platforms:
(and that's not even a complete list!), then I really have no problem looking qt the reported bug that someone's "exciting new world changing input method" runs into, and call it
BY DESIGN
BY DESIGN
BY DESIGN
BY DESIGN
BY DESIGN
without even bothering to feel a little bit embarrassed.
That code has been around for a long time, and a lot of of people depend on its behavior. It cannot be changed lightly. Unlike your new code, that no one has ever depended on before.
Frankly, no one has seriously entertained working outside the existing input stack. Which means they've implicitly agreed to work within its rules and limitations.
Perhaps I'll even talk about some of these limitations in the future, if I can sufficiently extract them from their original reports -- I'm not trying to use this Blog as a way to scold these input innovators, except generally like I do in today's blog. :-)
kinokijuf on 20 Dec 2011 8:28 AM:
I didn’t know Vista doesn’t have „Windows” in its name.
Michael S. Kaplan on 20 Dec 2011 11:00 AM:
Yup! Very controversial at the time....