While most commentary is (fairly) focused on browser behavior and keyboard hijacking, I'd point out another viewpoint: why the frak does every latin alphabet using nation need its own keyboard layout? Couple of diacritics is hardly a good reason to reshuffle the whole keyboard.
Because typewriters, and therefore keyboard layouts, predate computers. There's no technical reason to not just have composable meta-keys, excepting maybe the pure number of existent diacritics [0].
In fact, on the German keyboard, the circumflex (ˆ), acute accent (´), and grave accent (`) keys all compose with the next entered character. (That is, á is entered by pressing ´, then pressing a.)
Windows also offers an "international" keyboard mode which allows composition in a way similar to the German keyboard. [1]
> Because typewriters, and therefore keyboard layouts, predate computers
Even early US computers (and typewriters before them) had relatively varied keyboard layouts, but somehow[1] they still managed to converge into the standard 104 key layout that we have today in the early 90s (and that is a quarter of century ago). What we have missed is the extension of that convergence into international community.
> There's no technical reason to not just have composable meta-keys, excepting maybe the pure number of existent diacritics [0].
> In fact, on the German keyboard, the circumflex (ˆ), acute accent (´), and grave accent (`) keys all compose with the next entered character. (That is, á is entered by pressing ´, then pressing a.)
Dead keys are fairly good solution. Indeed I counted 19 dead-key diacritics on my countrys official standard keyboard (which almost nobody uses).
In Polish cz, rz, dz, and sz are very common, like sh and ch in English. Look at your US style keyboard and notice when typing ch and sh it is a L followed by R hand press. Now look what happens when you want to enter the common Polish cz, dz, sz, or rz. They are both L hand. So that's why Y and Z are better swapped for Polish language. L and Ł are better to be two separate keys because often there is only one modifier key for the letters with tails and it is on the right near the L key.
I'm sure they don't, but it's hard to overcome tradition. I imagine there was no real reason to share layouts across countries in the 1800s when a lot of this stuff was hashed out.
(I'm half joking, half serious - I grew up with a qwertz DE nodeadkey layout which certainly doesn't look sane from the outside either and exclusively use the US one now)
