4 ms·
Why Unicode is developed so irresponsibly?
I hope I won't be downvoted just because of the provocative title. As a guy who is somewhat obsessed with typography and so on, I really want to know.
Here is just one of the many cases that drive me nut. I've selected it because it is simple and concise and it is also cannot be justified by reasoning like "this is just Unicode is 35 years old".
| | Unicode number | Unicode block and range |
| - | -------------- | ---------------------------------- |
| ⇄ | U+21C4 | Arrows: Paired arrows and harpoons |
| ⇅ | U+21C5 | Arrows: Paired arrows and harpoons |
| ⇆ | U+21C6 | Arrows: Paired arrows and harpoons |
| ⇵ | U+21F5 | Arrows: Miscellaneous arrows | <-- Why?
Yes, I do know that 21F5 was added in Unicode version 3.2 and adding inevitably creates gaps between similar shapes.
But why it wasn't added at the same time with 21C4, 21C5, 21C6?
I really don't understand how it is possible that such a fundamental thing as Unicode is developed so irresponsibly.
- 752963e64 4y ago[dead]
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y agoYou can summarize unicode with one of its own characters: PILE OF SHIT The encoding scheme has no business defining colors. Fonts have no business containing colors. I'm led to believe the Han Unification was a problem but how many times does unicode define a latin 'a'?
- jsx91 4y agoYeah. And whereas they add more and more emojis, they don't want (yeah, they were asked for and they refused it in an arrogant way) to add a separate symbol for apostrophe (which is currently "the same" symbol as right single quotation mark) (and whereas there is separate symbol for, for example, ratio U+2236, which is different from colon U+003A).
- jsx91 4y agoThis post is not just a rant, by the way. It may be useful for other people like me who question themselves whether they are idiots or maybe Unicode is really developed by 14-year teenagers.
- FeistySkink 4y agoASCII isn't that much better to begin with: 5B [ 5D ] 7B { 7D } but: 28 ( 29 )
- toast0 4y agoUnicode is developed by consortium, has an intensely broad mission, and by necessity has very little ability to readdress past choices. It's fundamentally difficult to layout codepoints in a coherent numerical order. And naming them is difficult too. A from scratch unicode built around modern usage and modern computers would be different than the one we have built to work in ancient times and augmented many times since then. Han unification was partially motivated by a desire to keep code points within 16-bits, but active written languages can't fit in 16-bits anyway. There's persistent confusion between when 'same' shaped glyphs used with different meaning should or should not be combined into a single code point, there's no consistent applied philosophy. Unicode wants to believe that context tagging would happen outside of the stream of text, but then again, they do offer ltr and rtl tagging code points. Had language tagging code points been offered, it would offer a full answer to the question of code point combination, but at the cost of requiring all applications to deal with those code points, etc.