Regardless of the outcome of today’s finals in the Olympic Ice Hockey competition between Finland and Sweden, this has to be considered one of the most successful Olympic Games seen with Swedish eyes; if the number of medals is a measurement for such success.
Something that struck me as very odd, however, was the inability to show competitors’ names using proper national characters. Anja Pärson is displayed as “Anja Paerson”, Björn Lind as “Bjoern Lind”, and so on. Considering this is an event that is hosted by a european country, using some variant of the Latin1 character set, displaying characters like ÅÄÖ cannot possibly present a problem. So what am I missing here? This is like being sent back to the 1980:s where europeans had to consider themselves lucky if a non-european software developer had even considered characters outside the A-Za-z0-9 range.
Or is there another reason.. ? Is this done to actually help non-europeans from reading results of the scoreboards and pronouncing the names of the athletes?
The mind wonders.. who would have thought there’d be problems displaying ÅÄÖ on the TV when we’ve been talking about things like UTF for years.. ?!?!