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Unicode 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 re
by squaresmile 7y ago
Unicode 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 should get started.
> Greek, for example, has a lot of special-casing in Unicode. Korean is devilishly hard to render correctly the way Unicode handles it. And once you get into the right-to-left scripts, scripts that sort-of-sometimes omit vowels, or Devanagari (the script used to write a bunch of widely-spoken languages in India), you start needing very different capabilities than what's involved in Western European writing. _The better approach probably would have been to start with those, and work back to the European scripts_
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b09c0j/when_zo%C3%AB_zo%C3%AB_or_why_you_need_to_normalize_unicode/eiekg1x/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b09c0j/when_zo...
Funnily enough, URLs still can't do actual Unicode.
- BurningFrog 7y agoUnicode URL has serious security problems. The canonical example is google.com vs gооgle.com.
- riquito 7y agoThat was solved years ago by IDN/Punycode (implemented by any browser worth their salt).
- jagracey 7y agoI agree. I'll be releasing an article about this tomorrow. There are in-fact many security ramifications that have not been solved in practice.
- jagracey 7y agoCommented above, but to follow up from yesterday, here is the next post. "Hacking GitHub with Unicode" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21693550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21693550