191–200 of 463 posts
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And the transliteration in this case is so far from the original that it's barely recognisable for me (three out of four characters are different and as a native I perceive Ł as a fully separate character, not as a funny variation of L)
The fact that it's pronounced as Вуч and not Лодж still triggers me.
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I wouldn't be surprised if that created kafkaesque problems with other institutions that require name to match the bank account exactly , and break/reject non-ASCII at the same time.
I know an Åsa who became variously Åsa, Aasa and Asa after moving to a non-Scandinavian country. That took a while to untangle, and caused some of the problems you describe.
Its really not that hard though. PCRE regex support unicode letter classes. There is really no excuse for this type of issue.
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>We wanted a common charset for things like latin, extlatin, cjk, cyrillic, hebrew, etc. And we got it, for a while. we didn't even get that because slightly different looking characters from japanese and chinese (and other languages) got merged to be the same character in unicode due to having the same origin, meaning you have to use a font based on the language context for it to display correctly.
They are the same character, though. They do not use the same glyph in different language contexts, but Unicode is a character encoding, not a font standard.
You know, obvious presumption underlying Han Unification is that CJK languages must have a continuous dialect continuums, like villagers living in the middle of East China Sea between Shanghai and Nagasaki and Gwangju would speak half-Chinese-Japanese-Korean, and technical distinction only exist because of rivalry or something.
Alas, people don't really erect a house on the surface of an ocean, and CJK languages are each complete isolates with no known shared ancestries, so "it's gotta be all the same" thinking really don't work.
I know it's not very intuitive to think that Chinese and Japanese has ZERO syntactic similarity or mutual intelligibility despite relatively tiny mental shares they occupy, but it's just how things are.
As someone who really think name field should just be one field with any printable unicode characters, I do wonder what the hell would I need to do if I take customer names in this form, and then my system has to interact with some other service that requires first/last name split, and/or [a-zA-Z] validation, like a bank or postal service. Automatic transliteration seems to be very dangerous (wrong name on bank accou…
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There's no argument here. We could say it's only for script and alphabets, ok. It includes many undeciphered writing systems from antiquity with only a small handful of extent samples. Should we keep that, very likely to never be used character set, but exclude the extremely popular emojis? Exclude both? Why? Aren't computers capable enough? I used to be on the anti emoji bandwagon but really, it's all indefensible.…
No, no, no, no, no… So then we’d get ‘the same’ character with potentially infinite different encodings. Lovely. Unicode is a coding system, not a glyph system or font.
This conversation was had 20 years ago and your (and my) position lost. Might as well embrace the inevitable instead of insisting on the impossible.
Whether you agree with it or not won't actually affect unicode's outcome, only your own.
I'll say it again: this is the consequence of Unicode trying to be a mix of html and docx, instead of a charset. It went too far for an average Joe DevGuy to understand how to deal with it, so he just selects a subset he can handle and bans everything else. HN does that too - special symbols simply get removed. Unicode screwed itself up completely. We wanted a common charset for things like latin, extlatin, cjk, cyri…
IMO, the sin of Unicode is that they didn't just pick local language authorities and gave them standardized concepts like lines and characters, and start-of-language and end-of-language markers. Lots of Unicode issues come from handling languages that the code is not expecting, and codes currently has no means to select or report quirk supports. I suppose they didn't like getting national borders involved in technica…
What it sounds like you want is an easy way for English-language programmers to skip or strip non-ASCII text without having to reference any actual Unicode documentation. Which is a Unicode non-goal, obviously. And also very bad software engineering practice.
I'm also not sure what you're getting at with national borders and language authorities, but both of those were absolutely involved with Unicode and still are.
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I'm happy to discriminate against those damn ancient Sumerians and anyone still using goddamn Linear B.
Sure, but removing those wouldn't make Unicode any simpler, they're just character sets. The GP is complaining about things like combining characters and diacritic modifiers, which make Unicode "ugly" but are necessary if you want to represent real languages used by billions of people.
I'm also concerned by having to normalize representations that use combining character etc. but I will add that there are assumptions that you can break just by including weird charsets.
For example the space character in Ogham, U+1680 is considered whitespace, but may not be invisible, ultimately because of the mechanics of writing something that's like the branches coming off a tree though carved around a large stone. That might be annoying to think about when you're designing a login page.
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>We wanted a common charset for things like latin, extlatin, cjk, cyrillic, hebrew, etc. And we got it, for a while. we didn't even get that because slightly different looking characters from japanese and chinese (and other languages) got merged to be the same character in unicode due to having the same origin, meaning you have to use a font based on the language context for it to display correctly.
They are the same character, though. They do not use the same glyph in different language contexts, but Unicode is a character encoding, not a font standard.