Last modified: 2013-09-20 05:18:42 UTC
Assuming we implement bug 39558. That means the counter in the corner of the save dialog will be decreasing more than 1 per character on average. English users will likely not notice it as quickly, but € (EURO SYMBOL) for instance is 3 bytes. And in foreign languages it will be more common entirely. Right now the counter has no unit, which would be confusing (the natural expectation is to assume character count). We can add a unit word "# bytes" instead. But I'm not sure that is an improvement, do we want to face users with that?
Note that this is a consequence of bug 4715. Right now we just cut off the comment if it is too long; adding a confusing, but correct counter helps a lot. Now to the question: I think adding the word "bytes" would help, since (a) some people know what a byte is and (b) even those who don't and see that the counter differs from a character counter may realize that "bytes" can mean something else. They probably don't assume it is a character counter if there is an unknown term behind the number and so they have less expectation and get less confused if the counter differs from their expectation.
Appending " bytes" seems like a reasonable compromise here (though the i18n will be fun).
Went with bytes for the time being. Will change when core bug fixed. Patched in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/23451
(In reply to comment #2) > Appending " bytes" seems like a reasonable compromise here (though the i18n > will be fun). I've -1-ed the patch mentioned in comment 3 for not being understandable to users. We should provide them with a reasonable indication of how many more characters they can insert. Is it possible to do something with the average number of bytes per character for what's already been typed, and give an indication like "~n characters remaining"? P.s. issue should be closed when patch is merged, not when it's submitted.
Merged and to be deployed in wmf12 train.
