Trying to do something smart is usually the wrong approach and leads to users tangling themselves in invisible state that they do not understand and can't chang

Trying to do something smart is usually the wrong approach and leads to users tangling themselves in invisible state that they do not understand and can't change. The best thing would have been for Unicode to not do Han unification. The second best would be to provide alternate glyphs now. The third best is to display the characters either in the language they're written in, when you know that for sure (usually for text that you wrote yourself), or in the user's most likely locale, when you don't. For locale I would go down this list of traits and pick the first that matches: 1) The language setting on your website if you have one and have translated it to C/J/K. You may use different TLDs for the different languages and discern that way, too. 2) The list of preferred languages from the browser. This is usually unreliable, but if someone has gone to the trouble of inputting "english=1;japanese=.9;chinese=.8", then it's a fair bet they want Japanese Kanji usually and will be understanding if you use them in place of Chinese Han characters. 3) The country to which the user's IP belongs. The least ideal option, but if you're in Korea and reading a random string of Hanzi, you probably expect them to look like Hanzi. You will show the wrong characters to some users, but the behaviour is understandable. "Oh, the site is showing me Korean characters because I'm in Korea." is a lot easier to grasp than "The site is showing me Chinese characters because I clicked a dropdown one time that I forgot about and now I have no idea why my name is written wrong!" You can argue about point 2) that some users might set their language preferences and forget about it, but so far I have never observed a user who doesn't know about them messing with the setting.