5 ms·

Come on. There is a huge stretch in jumping from only supporting ANSI due to legacy, laziness, whatever to being inadvertently “racist”. It is clumsy to say “us

Come on. There is a huge stretch in jumping from only supporting ANSI due to legacy, laziness, whatever to being inadvertently “racist”. It is clumsy to say “usual” instead of “a-zA-Z”. It is not an exclusionary system. No one gets left out due to lack of unicode.

nerdponx 5y ago
It's not just that the system is exclusionary (and definitionally it is, even if only for technical reasons). It's that the phrase "unusual characters" is inherently exclusionary - if your name isn't spelled a certain way, it and you are unusual. Moreover "unusual" is never actually defined. So it's doubly insulting because the definition of "unusual" itself is something like special knowledge held only by the in-group. Not to mention it's just bad UX, and clearly bad design if your name can just be two apostrophes.
- D13Fd 5y ago
  Agreed, for the most part. The biggest problem is the word “unusual” in my view. I think all systems should be designed to support full Unicode text at this point, but it’s hard to fault someone for failing to do so without more information. It may be due to Unicode text restrictions in back-end apps or related systems that were outside the scope of the project. Or it could just be laziness.
ryukafalz 5y ago
> No one gets left out due to lack of unicode. Except people with names that don't fit into the ASCII character set, I guess? What if this was a government site that you have to interact with for some reason? Something where using your full name is important?
- harperlee 5y ago
  You use a romanized version instead of e.g. kanji. Or you lose apostrophes. My name does not typically fit english forms and i personally would blush if I had to say I’m being left out. Sure, it would be better if I did not have to do this, but bucketing this into the “the system is racist” argument together with other real issues, imho, its compeltely tone deaf.
  - sneak 5y ago
    People shouldn't have to misspell their names because the software sucks.
    - harperlee 5y ago
      That is true. It is also not my point above.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  > What if this was a government site that you have to interact with for some reason? Something where using your full name is important? In the US, your legal name for government purposes generally consists only of the characters a-z/A-Z without diacritics (whether - and ' are included depends on the state).

nerdponx 5y ago

It's not just that the system is exclusionary (and definitionally it is, even if only for technical reasons). It's that the phrase "unusual characters" is inherently exclusionary - if your name isn't spelled a certain way, it and you are unusual. Moreover "unusual" is never actually defined. So it's doubly insulting because the definition of "unusual" itself is something like special knowledge held only by the in-group. Not to mention it's just bad UX, and clearly bad design if your name can just be two apostrophes.

D13Fd 5y ago
Agreed, for the most part. The biggest problem is the word “unusual” in my view. I think all systems should be designed to support full Unicode text at this point, but it’s hard to fault someone for failing to do so without more information. It may be due to Unicode text restrictions in back-end apps or related systems that were outside the scope of the project. Or it could just be laziness.

ryukafalz 5y ago

> No one gets left out due to lack of unicode. Except people with names that don't fit into the ASCII character set, I guess? What if this was a government site that you have to interact with for some reason? Something where using your full name is important?

harperlee 5y ago
You use a romanized version instead of e.g. kanji. Or you lose apostrophes. My name does not typically fit english forms and i personally would blush if I had to say I’m being left out. Sure, it would be better if I did not have to do this, but bucketing this into the “the system is racist” argument together with other real issues, imho, its compeltely tone deaf.
- sneak 5y ago
  People shouldn't have to misspell their names because the software sucks.
  - harperlee 5y ago
    That is true. It is also not my point above.
jcranmer 5y ago
> What if this was a government site that you have to interact with for some reason? Something where using your full name is important? In the US, your legal name for government purposes generally consists only of the characters a-z/A-Z without diacritics (whether - and ' are included depends on the state).