Is there a way to read this with the mouse cursors disabled? It seems like great content but all the movement on the page is way too distracting.
EDIT: I've never been downvoted for asking a question before. Weird, but okay.
What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
251–260 of 572 posts
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most European keyboard layouts have it the other way around: first press a "dead key" for the diacritic mark and then the letter to apply it to. Where some layouts may require this method for some characters, another keyboard layout may have the same character on a dedicated key. The program receives the combined character as one unit, and does not need to be aware of different keyboard layouts.
> Most European keyboard layouts have it the other way around: first press a "dead key" for the diacritic mark and then the letter to apply it to. Which ones? At least the French and German ones don’t work like that: there is no composing, just separate keys for all the characters with diacritics that appear in the language.
Which French layout would that be? I've never seen a French keyboard where this is true. French is my native language. On layouts I'm familiar with, some accented letters have separate keys like é, but not all, the others are made by composing an accent key with a letter.
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#253I'm sorry but the website design is extremely distracting. The mouse pointers at least are easy to delete with the inspector; The background color is not the best choice for reading material, but the inexcusable part is the width of the content. This content must be really awesome for someone to go through the trouble of interacting with such a site.
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Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#254There's one part of this document that I would push extremely hard against, and that's the notion that "extended grapheme clusters" are the one true, right way to think of characters in Unicode, and therefore any language that views the length in any other way is doing it wrong. The truth of the matter is that there are several different definitions of "character", depending on what you want to use it for. An extende…
I'm not Korean but seeing that said of the Hangul example definitely made me pause - I doubt Koreans think of that example as a single grapheme (open to correction), though it is an excellent example all the same since it demonstrates the complexity of defining "units" consistently across language.
It reminds me a little of Open Street Map's inconsistent administrative hierarchies ("states", "countries", "counties", etc. being represented at different administrative "levels" in their hierarchy for each geographical area), and how that hinders consistency in styling- font size, zoom levels, etc. being generally applied by level.
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#255This is quite a good write up. An answer to one of the author's questions: > Why does the fi ligature even have its own code point? No idea. On of the principles of Unicode is round trip compatibility. That is you should be able to read in a file encoded with some obsolete coding system and write it out again properly. Maybe frob it a bit with your unicode-based tools first. This is a good principle, though less usefu…
> So the fi ligature was in a legacy encoding system and thus must be in Unicode.
Most of the pre-composed latin ligatures are generally from EBCDIC codepages. People in the ancient Mainframe era wanted nice typesetting too, but computer fonts with ligature support were a much later invention.
You can see fi and several others directly in EBCDIC code page 361:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Character_Encodings/Code_Table...
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This kind of assertiveness leads to garbage like C++ still not supporting UTF8 properly in 2023. My name contains diacritics. UTF8 encoded diacritics work just fine in C++.
What do you mean by "work"? That you can store arbitrary bytes in a string? That's a pretty low bar.
> What do you mean by "work"? That you can store arbitrary bytes in a string? That's a pretty low bar.
That's all that's needed for a backend language.
The backend does not need to understand, or even acknowledge the existence, of grapheme clusters. Because the frontend is already having to understand all of this, it should be normalising any multi-codepoint ambiguous cluster anyway.
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you type "a", combine it with "´", then change your mind and hit backspace, you probably want to end up with "a" even through "á" was a thing "visually displayed as a single unit".
I expect to delete the character "á". And I prefer consistency too so I expect "œ" and " " and " " to be deleted as one unit. edit: emojis are filtered by HN
Even the emoji's that you create by combining multiple emojis? Type one emoji, then a second, it merges into one. What happens when you backspace?
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#258Is it just me, or is anyone else seeing what looks like the mouse pointer of everyone else reading the page, like 1,000 little ants on the screen
I know which site you are talking about before even clicking the article :(
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
(sarcasm) It's revenge against anyone with certain kinds of visual impairments and/or concentration issues because the ex-spouse of the author which turned out to be a terrible person had such. (sarcasm try 2) It's revenge against anyone using JS on the net with the author trying to subtle hint that JS is bad. (realistic) It's probably on of: - the website is a static view of some collaborative tool which has that fu…
Hi, author here. In case you really want to know: no, it’s custom-made and works exactly as intended. There are two main reasons: 1. Fun. Modern internet is boring, most blog posts are just black text on white background. Hard to remember where you read what. And you can’t really have fun without breaking some expectations. 2. Sense of community. Internet is a lonely place, and I don’t necessarily like that. I like t…
I like your content but I do think you need to rethink #1. Fun is usless if no one wants to show up because they are annoyed.
Re: What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023
#260What on EARTH is that mouse cursor thing all about? Why would you even bother writing this, then making it impossible to read properly?
(sarcasm) It's revenge against anyone with certain kinds of visual impairments and/or concentration issues because the ex-spouse of the author which turned out to be a terrible person had such. (sarcasm try 2) It's revenge against anyone using JS on the net with the author trying to subtle hint that JS is bad. (realistic) It's probably on of: - the website is a static view of some collaborative tool which has that fu…
The author has several other writeups:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The cursors will only be a problem during front page HN traffic. And the opt-out for people who care is reader mode / disable js / static mirror. Not sure if there's any better way to appease the fun-havers and the plain content preferrers at the same time. Maybe a "hide cursors" button on screen? I, for one, had a delightful moment poking other cursors.