What is that by the way? Never run across it here on the mainland?

The trade-off is between convenience editing and convenient annotating. We can always annotate the content when the blogger submits a post, but that also makes it impossible to do real-time editing: you’re stuck with whatever popups you get and it’s back to manual editing whenever you want to make changes. This way you have to click when you want to see definitions, but you’re guaranteed the most up-to-date definition/gloss we have, and the popups won’t go obsolete as the tech improves.

As a user myself, I don’t mind the clicking and trivial wait, since I’ll only want to see the pinyin/gloss if I don’t know the word. But I may just not be representative. If people are interested in another setup, we can take a look. Only thing that’s off the table is annotating EVERYTHING on page load, since that could quickly grind the server to a halt, without any guarantee people are actually looking at the popups.

It’s more of a convenience for the blogger. It automatically does everything for you, albeit poorly. Putting it on my blog is a good thing for the dictionary. They really don’t get many traditional Chinese users adding to the dictionary, and it’s very easy to edit and submit entries with this setup… or at least it will be after David gets it working.

The editing functionality is going to need some work. In the meantime, people can still add words/phrases, but the entries won’t get added automatically like simplified content. Will see if I can come up with something to fix this next week so there’s no need to wait.

This gives us some strange entries like that. But the upside is that people are actually correcting them on the phrase level rather than letting the errors persist, so the setup is turning out to be good for the database.

Don’t be fooled by his “I like traditional characters too” rhetoric!