Charset="WTF-8" • Hacker News Board

Re: Charset="WTF-8"

#461

Post by imrejonk » Wed, Nov 27, 2024, 5:18 PM UTC

account42 wrote: post #452

imrejonk wrote: post #43

A system not supporting non-latin characters in personal names is pitiful, but a system telling the user that they have an invalid name is outright insulting.

It's only insulting if you want to be insulted. You'd do better learning to understand that its a computer system and not a personal attack.

While I agree with you that an error message like this should not be taken as a personal attack, it still causes a horrible user experience. It’s not like the developers of these systems had no choice in the wording of these errors: they picked the insensitive computer-says-no option, while they could have went with an apologetic “Sorry, our system does not support special characters” instead.

Re: Charset="WTF-8"

#462

Post by sandreas » Thu, Nov 28, 2024, 2:01 PM UTC

account42 wrote: post #431

sandreas wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should have asked how they would encode the german currency sign (€ for euro) in ASCII or its german counterpart latin1/iso-8859-1... It's not possible. However I bet they would argument to use iso-8859-15 (latin9 / latin0) with the international currency sign (¤) instead or insist that char 128 of latin1 is almost always meant as €, so just ignore the standard in these cases and use a new font. This would only f…

UTF-8 is simple, it's Unicode that is complex.

Besides UTF-8 is not that simple, it still was irony :-)

Re: Charset="WTF-8"

#463

Post by lmm » Fri, Nov 29, 2024, 1:07 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #355

lmm wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm curious if anyone can think of any other non-alphabetic characters used in legal names around the world, in other scripts? Some Japanese names are written with Japanese characters that do not have Unicode codepoints. (The Unicode consortium claims that these characters are somehow "really" Chinese characters just written in a different font; holders of those names tend to disagree, but somehow the programmer co…

Ha, well I don't think we need to worry about validating characters if they can't be typed in a text box in the first place. ;) But very interesting thanks!

> Ha, well I don't think we need to worry about validating characters if they can't be typed in a text box in the first place. ;)

They are frequently typed in text boxes, any software seriously targeting Japan supports them, you just have to use Shift-JIS (or EUC-JP). So your codebase needs to actually support text encodings rather than just blindly assuming everything is UTF-8.