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Unicode Is Awesome
51–60 of 159 posts
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, where Unicode is complicated is where the Unicode people decided to make it complicated to bolster their egos, to the detriment of everyone downstream of them. Like with most standardization, the people at the helm are the wrong people with the wrong motivations.
As a developer who's been working intimately with user-facing strings for years, I have to disagree in the strongest possible terms. Unicode is one of the borderline zero standards that is almost angelic in its purity, with only an extremely few things I think might have served better if done differently.
> As a developer who's been working intimately with user-facing strings for years, ...
User-facing is easy; things go downhill when users have system-facing strings of their own, and some of those strings become other-user-facing strings.
> with only an extremely few things I think might have served better if done differently.
Thus, in spite of disagreeing in the strongest possible terms, you do have some nits to pick.
A "few things" could be far-reaching. For instance, allowing the same semantic character to be encoded in more than one way can count as "one thing". If someone happens to think this is the only problem with Unicode, then that's "extremely few things". Yet, it's pretty major.
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#53Unicode is pretty amazing. People REALLY like to complain about unicode, but where it's complicated, it's because the _problem space_ is complicated. Which it is. People are actually complaining that they wish handling global text wasn't so complicated, like, that humans had been a lot simpler and more limited with their inventions of alphabets and how they were used in typesetting and printing and what not, and that…
There is way more than enough wacky stuff introduced by Unicode. Having dozens of letters A, for example. And giving a Japanese Kanji character the same code as a Chinese one that usually looks similar.
That might be wacky to you but I'm not sure it's wacky to the people to whom it makes a difference.
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#54Unicode is pretty amazing. People REALLY like to complain about unicode, but where it's complicated, it's because the _problem space_ is complicated. Which it is. People are actually complaining that they wish handling global text wasn't so complicated, like, that humans had been a lot simpler and more limited with their inventions of alphabets and how they were used in typesetting and printing and what not, and that…
There is way more than enough wacky stuff introduced by Unicode. Having dozens of letters A, for example. And giving a Japanese Kanji character the same code as a Chinese one that usually looks similar.
Unicode did not introduce having dozens of letters A, they existed without unicode. Unicode just gives you a way to represent them -- and bonus, often to normalize them all to a normal letter A too.
It is a mistake to think that Unicode has the ability to people's text behavior by not supporting things. I mean, maybe it does now that it's so popular, but in order to get adoption it had to support what people were actually doing.
People had use cases to put "𝔄" adn "A" in the same document and keep them distinct without unicode. It is not a service for unicode to refuse to let them; and if it tried, it would just lead to people finding a way to do it in a non-standardized or non-unicode-standardized way anyway, which still wouldn't help anyone.
You might just as well say "I don't understand why we need lowercase AND capital letters, the standard is just complicating things supporting both -- the ancient romans didn't need two cases after all"
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
25 or 50 examples of inconsistencies would help support your tone.
Unicode was originally designed to fit in 16 bits, and this is memorialized in Java APIs that make it easy to mess up. The unicode character does not specify the glyph to draw. Han unification is the best known, but not only source, of this challenge. The glyph does not specify the unicode character. Precombined vs combining characters is a source of this challenge. The result is that a name can be entered into a dat…
One of your points is that an encoding designed to handle languages has support for more than one kind of white space. Given that languages use more than one kind of white space, this is sort of a necessity.
Another one is that a standard designed to support all languages has a feature necessary for supporting some languages.
Those aren't inconsistencies, so do feel free to go on.
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#56Unicode definitely has flaws but that doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and go back to "ASCII and other character sets." There's a reason we moved on from that world. However, I bet we will see another encoding coming up eventually (within 30 years) which solves the problems Unicode currently has and introduces a new set of problems as well. I saw this comment [0] about how that encoding sh…
Unicode URL has serious security problems. The canonical example is google.com vs gооgle.com.
I agree. I'll be releasing an article about this tomorrow. There are in-fact many security ramifications that have not been solved in practice.
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is way more than enough wacky stuff introduced by Unicode. Having dozens of letters A, for example. And giving a Japanese Kanji character the same code as a Chinese one that usually looks similar.
Unicode did not introduce having dozens of letters A, they existed without unicode. Unicode just gives you a way to represent them -- and bonus, often to normalize them all to a normal letter A too. It is a mistake to think that Unicode has the ability to people's text behavior by not supporting things. I mean, maybe it does now that it's so popular, but in order to get adoption it had to support what people were act…
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Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#58I mean, awesome for whom? It might be awesome for end users as you can type in or copy/paste things without caring which language you're using. But for programmers, Unicode is a bloated monstrosity and a source of endless nightmare. Eventually, it's not going to be awesome for end users either because it will be plagued by a lot of (subtle) inconsistencies. Unicode looks a lot like a leaky abstraction to me (because…
If you think Unicode is a "bloated monstrosity and a source of endless nightmare," what would you remove from Unicode? And if you're going to respond "emoji", I'll point out that removing emoji doesn't actually remove anything that makes text processing with Unicode difficult, just makes it more likely that people will assume that what works for English works for everybody. (Side note: it is not possible to accuratel…
Those words are adequately represented in ASCII by 'facade' and 'resume'
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#59Unicode is an inspirational standard. We started with so many different character encodings and wound up pretty universally using Unicode. I wouldn't be surprised to see browsers start to drop support for other encodings - who even uses them at this point? Are there any scenarios where you wouldn't use Unicode, other than an every-byte-matters embedded system?
There's a not-insignificant number of Japanese websites that can only correctly display using EUC-JP or ShiftJIS. It seems very Latin/ASCII centric to push for disabling non-UTF-8 encodings, especially since the only reason UTF-8 works so well on ASCII websites is due to its backwards compatibility. If it were the reverse, and UTF-8 were backwards compatible with EUC-JP/CJK, but not ASCII, I doubt you'd be pushing fo…
There is no character in EUC-JP or Shift-JIS that is not in Unicode--the explicit goal of Unicode in its original formulation was to be able to losslessly round-trip any other charset through Unicode, and the initial version of Unicode incorporated the source kanji lists for the EUC-JP/Shift-JIS charsets in their entirety.
Re: Unicode Is Awesome
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a developer who's been working intimately with user-facing strings for years, I have to disagree in the strongest possible terms. Unicode is one of the borderline zero standards that is almost angelic in its purity, with only an extremely few things I think might have served better if done differently.
> As a developer who's been working intimately with user-facing strings for years, ... User-facing is easy; things go downhill when users have system-facing strings of their own, and some of those strings become other-user-facing strings. > with only an extremely few things I think might have served better if done differently. Thus, in spite of disagreeing in the strongest possible terms, you do have some nits to pic…
Your idea that either there are NO "nits to pick" (things that could have been done better in a standard, complete perfection), OR it means that the standards-makers "decided to make it complicated to bolster their egos" -- is ABSOLUTELY INSANE.