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First of all, there is no new unification work ongoing. The Unicode Consortium moved on from that by moving on from UCS-2. UCS-2 drove unification as a way to

First of all, there is no new unification work ongoing. The Unicode Consortium moved on from that by moving on from UCS-2. UCS-2 drove unification as a way to preserve precious codespace. There used to be language tag codepoints for this, but they've been deprecated. Han unification is an accident of history: a result of UTF-8 not having existed until it was too late! There's not going to be a different new Unicode for doing away with Han unification, which is why no one mentions it: besides crying about it, what else can one do? Maybe we should revive language tags? Anyways, isn't the difference between unified Han/Kanji characters mostly stylistic rather than semantic? I'm not denying that many users would get annoyed, but again, what to do about it??

innocenat 7y ago
It's only stylistic issue if you also consider a and α (alpha) to also be just stylistic different. I have learned to live with it, but it is very annoying.
- cryptonector 7y ago
  Do you want to see all Han texts in your preferred style, or do you want to see them in the style corresponding to the language they were written in?
  - innocenat 7y ago
    In the original language, of course. Why is that even a question. That is like asking if Geek people would want to read Latin script using Greek alphabet or not. You keep using the word 'style', so you agree that α is a style of a? Then I have no more comment. It's not 'style' at all.
    - cryptonector 7y ago
      > Why is that even a question. Why wouldn't it be. As I'm not a user of CJK scripts it seemed like a fair question to ask. > You keep using the word 'style', so you agree that α is a style of a? I didn't have a better word for it. Oddly alpha is getting different renderings in the text input box than in your comment. So Han unification makes CJK as hard to read for you as mixing Greek and Latin scripts would for me. That's what I wanted to understand. Thanks.
wheybags 7y ago
It's different enough that users will immediately complain if you get it wrong. And it means that you, as a developer who might not understand either Chinese or Japanese, now has to deal with the fallout by setting a different font in your application depending on which of the two languages it is. This happe ed end for us in factorio, and it was super annoying, because it's really hard to spot the problem before it goes live because you A: don't know the problem exists, how would you? B: have a hard time seeing it even when you do know. The whole poi t of Unicode is to not have to think about this crap or handle it explicitly, and this breaks that guarantee fantastically.
- cryptonector 7y ago
  See the whole point about history. All you're doing is crying about it :( Here's a question: when a native Chinese speaker reads a Japanese text, do they want to see it in Chinese style or Japanese style? If the former, then just know that that's their preference and always use their preference -- easy fix. If the latter... you need to know the language of a text (or sub-text), and that requires either language tags or language recognition. I expect it's the latter, to make it easier to recognize foreign text, which is not necessarily easy to read. After all, native Chinese, Japanese, and Korean speakers who don't speak the other languages can only glean so much meaning from Han/Kanji text in the others' languages. That's because while often ideographic characters are used for (common) meaning, sometimes they are used for the sounds of the words they identify but not their meanings.
ksec 7y ago
The same could be said whether è é should be the same as e with different fonts. People who cares about it would complain. To those who only uses English it is only the same e.
- microtherion 7y ago
  I don't think that's the same, because e.g. in French, e, é, è, and ê are all used, with different pronunciations.
  - cryptonector 7y ago
    Not just different pronunciations. ê isn't about pronunciation but about indicating that "there used to be an 's' after this e". French written w/o circumflex accents doesn't change in pronunciation, not really, nor -mostly- in meaning, but it does look very annoying to French speakers as well as to native speakers of other Romance languages: the reason is that that reminder is in fact useful for translation. I'm guessing Han unification is at least annoying like losing circumflex accents would be.

innocenat 7y ago

It's only stylistic issue if you also consider a and α (alpha) to also be just stylistic different. I have learned to live with it, but it is very annoying.

cryptonector 7y ago
Do you want to see all Han texts in your preferred style, or do you want to see them in the style corresponding to the language they were written in?
- innocenat 7y ago
  In the original language, of course. Why is that even a question. That is like asking if Geek people would want to read Latin script using Greek alphabet or not. You keep using the word 'style', so you agree that α is a style of a? Then I have no more comment. It's not 'style' at all.
  - cryptonector 7y ago
    > Why is that even a question. Why wouldn't it be. As I'm not a user of CJK scripts it seemed like a fair question to ask. > You keep using the word 'style', so you agree that α is a style of a? I didn't have a better word for it. Oddly alpha is getting different renderings in the text input box than in your comment. So Han unification makes CJK as hard to read for you as mixing Greek and Latin scripts would for me. That's what I wanted to understand. Thanks.

wheybags 7y ago

It's different enough that users will immediately complain if you get it wrong. And it means that you, as a developer who might not understand either Chinese or Japanese, now has to deal with the fallout by setting a different font in your application depending on which of the two languages it is. This happe ed end for us in factorio, and it was super annoying, because it's really hard to spot the problem before it goes live because you A: don't know the problem exists, how would you? B: have a hard time seeing it even when you do know. The whole poi t of Unicode is to not have to think about this crap or handle it explicitly, and this breaks that guarantee fantastically.

cryptonector 7y ago
See the whole point about history. All you're doing is crying about it :( Here's a question: when a native Chinese speaker reads a Japanese text, do they want to see it in Chinese style or Japanese style? If the former, then just know that that's their preference and always use their preference -- easy fix. If the latter... you need to know the language of a text (or sub-text), and that requires either language tags or language recognition. I expect it's the latter, to make it easier to recognize foreign text, which is not necessarily easy to read. After all, native Chinese, Japanese, and Korean speakers who don't speak the other languages can only glean so much meaning from Han/Kanji text in the others' languages. That's because while often ideographic characters are used for (common) meaning, sometimes they are used for the sounds of the words they identify but not their meanings.

ksec 7y ago

The same could be said whether è é should be the same as e with different fonts. People who cares about it would complain. To those who only uses English it is only the same e.

microtherion 7y ago
I don't think that's the same, because e.g. in French, e, é, è, and ê are all used, with different pronunciations.
- cryptonector 7y ago
  Not just different pronunciations. ê isn't about pronunciation but about indicating that "there used to be an 's' after this e". French written w/o circumflex accents doesn't change in pronunciation, not really, nor -mostly- in meaning, but it does look very annoying to French speakers as well as to native speakers of other Romance languages: the reason is that that reminder is in fact useful for translation. I'm guessing Han unification is at least annoying like losing circumflex accents would be.