Microsoft product improvement suggestions

Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge

Here is a list of the issues that I would most like Microsoft to have a look at in their products, standards and conventions:

• The IBM PC Real Time Clock should run in UT.
• Windows Media Player 6.3 for Solaris should not ignore $AUDIODEV.
• German/Dutch/etc. keyboard users should be prevented from entering the spacing acute accent (U+00B4) by any other means than deadacute+space, because too many people accidentally use it as an apostrophe (as in "it´s").
• The keyboard input methods used by Word for entering directional quotation marks and other typographic symbols not found on standard keyboards should be moved from Word into the keyboard driver, such that all applications benefit from them and users universally use typographically correct Unicode symbols. The ASCII quotation mark, apostrophe, and hyphen-minus characters should only be generated from keystrokes in a special ASCII mode for writing source code, etc.
• It would be wonderful if Microsoft could phase out for the MIME content type text/plain any encodings other than

    Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
    Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
  

  in email. Other platforms are now (as of 2002) well prepared to receive Unicode/UTF-8 messages. Avoiding legacy encodings in the future will significantly reduce the risk of data corruption by incompatible conversion tables. The quoted-printable transfer encoding has become irrelevant in practice for the sending mail agent thanks to the introduction of ESMTP.
• UTF-8 should be used universally in HTML files generated by Microsoft products. Same reason as above.
• The manual selection of the character encoding in Internet Explorer should be phased out. This will encourage web content providers to signal the used encoding correctly in HTTP or HTML headers, or better to just use UTF-8 everywhere as the HTML/XML default encoding.

The following two proposals are perhaps slightly more controversial, as they relate more to U.S. customary habits rather than clear engineering necessities, but discussion would be welcome:

• It would be wonderful if Microsoft could set the default numeric date and time display format for the English (U.S.) language to the ISO 8601 format, to get the US population finally used to the modern globally preferred 24h time-of-day notation and to a sensible alternative for the confusing mixed-endian mm/dd/yy date. Similarly, the use of inch-pound units in any form of software should be phased out. If the U.S. want to fully join globalisation, its people will have to get used to globally accepted basic conventions such as the metric system and the 00:00-23:59 time notation. I like to think that a standards-setting industry leader such as Microsoft has a responsibility to lead here and set a trend, rather than just follow.
• For example, font sizes should be selectable in millimeters. (Though, admittedly, this area could need a bit clearer standardization first, because the actual meaning of the currently used point dimensions is largely undefined and used inconsistently in different fonts.)

Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any related information, ideas, questions or suggestions.

Microsoft has a product feedback page.

Markus Kuhn

created 2001-07-02 – last modified 2003-01-30 – http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/mswish/