User talk:Qalle
Special characters
Hey, I appreciate the cleanup you're doing on the wiki, but could you avoid replacing normal characters with special character variants, such as x with × and - with –? These special characters are difficult for the average user to type because they are not present on standard keyboards and they break ctrl+F functionality in browsers. For example, the change from 8x8 to 8×8 on the PPU registers page means users can no longer search on the page for 8x8 sprite mode, and because these characters are so similar, it's difficult to understand why the search fails. Chromium also treats - and – differently for search purposes, and they're extremely similar in fixed width fonts. To a lesser extent, I'm also not a fan of the … special character for similar reasons.
Furthermore, I believe this change produces an ongoing maintenance challenge. We have a substantial amount of content using the normal characters that would have to be converted. Standardizing on special ones also means article authors will have to use them going forward, and I don't expect them to consistently do this because it's not obvious when these characters should be used, they're hard to type, and they're hard to differentiate from normal characters. Therefore, we'll have to have to frequently edit new material to fix characters. On the other hand, if it doesn't matter whether we're consistent about normal vs special characters, then it's not clear why we should be converting normal to special characters in the first place.
My preference would be to revert the already-converted characters back to their normal equivalents and prefer characters that are easy to type and search for. Fiskbit (talk) 02:24, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
