4 ms·

> Can we please talk about Unicode without the myth of Han Unification being bad somehow? It's not a myth, as anyone living in Japan knows, and the "just use U

by lmm 3y ago

> Can we please talk about Unicode without the myth of Han Unification being bad somehow? It's not a myth, as anyone living in Japan knows, and the "just use Unicode, all you need is Unicode" dogma is really harmful; a lot of "international" software has become significantly worse for Japanese users since it took hold. > The problem here is exactly the lack of unification in Roman alphabets! Problems caused by failing to unify characters that look the same do not mean it was a good idea to unify characters that look different!

earthboundkid 3y ago
> It's not a myth, as anyone living in Japan knows I lived in Japan. It is a myth. :-¥
eviks 3y ago
Would it still be harmful if language tag were used?
- lmm 3y ago
  If the tag mechanism was used consistently and handled by all software, no. But in practice the only way that would happen is if the tag mechanism was required for many languages. Unicode is, in practice, a system that works the same way for ~every human language except Japanese, which makes it much worse than the previous "byte stream + encoding" system where any program written to support anything more than just US English would naturally work correctly for every other language, including Japanese.
  - renhanxue 3y ago
    > Unicode is, in practice, a system that works the same way for ~every human language except Japanese This is simply not true. As I've pointed out in a sibling comment, Unicode has a lot of surprising and frustrating behaviors with many European languages as well if you use it without locale data. The characters will look right, but e.g. searching, sorting and case-insensitive comparisons will not work as expected if the application is not locale aware.
    - lmm 3y ago
      > The characters will look right, but e.g. searching, sorting and case-insensitive comparisons will not work as expected This is quite a different situation from Japan. A lot of applications don't do searching, sorting, or case-insensitive comparisons, but virtually every application displays text.
jhanschoo 3y ago
> "just use Unicode, all you need is Unicode" dogma is really harmful; a lot of "international" software has become significantly worse for Japanese users since it took hold. The alternative would be that the software used Shift_JIS with a Japanese font. If the software used a Japanese font for Japanese it wouldn't need metadata anyway. There really isn't a problem with Han unification as long as you always switch to a font appropriate for your language; you don't need to configure metadata. If you don't you are always going to run into missing codepoint problems. In cases where the system or user configures the font, properly using Unicode is still easier than configuring alternate encodings for multiple languages.
- lmm 3y ago
  > The alternative would be that the software used Shift_JIS with a Japanese font. As far as I know all Shift_JIS fonts are Japanese; you would have to be wilfully perverse to make one that wasn't. > If the software used a Japanese font for Japanese it wouldn't need metadata anyway. If it just uses the system default font for that encoding, as almost all software does, then it will also behave correctly. > There really isn't a problem with Han unification as long as you always switch to a font appropriate for your language Right. But approximately no software does that, because if you don't do it then your software will work fine everywhere other than Japan, and even in Japan it will kind-of-sort-of work to the point that a non-native probably won't notice a problem. > In cases where the system or user configures the font, properly using Unicode is still easier than configuring alternate encodings for multiple languages. I'm not convinced it is. Configuring your software to use the right font on a Unicode system is, as far as I can see, at least as hard as configuring your software to use the right encoding on a non-Unicode system. It just fails less obviously when you don't, particularly outside Japan.
  - GoblinSlayer 3y ago
    Japanese programs aren't globalized and already rely on the system being fine tuned for Japanese, so default font is already correct.
    - 3y ago

by lmm 3y ago

earthboundkid 3y ago

> It's not a myth, as anyone living in Japan knows I lived in Japan. It is a myth. :-¥

eviks 3y ago

Would it still be harmful if language tag were used?

lmm 3y ago
If the tag mechanism was used consistently and handled by all software, no. But in practice the only way that would happen is if the tag mechanism was required for many languages. Unicode is, in practice, a system that works the same way for ~every human language except Japanese, which makes it much worse than the previous "byte stream + encoding" system where any program written to support anything more than just US English would naturally work correctly for every other language, including Japanese.
- renhanxue 3y ago
  > Unicode is, in practice, a system that works the same way for ~every human language except Japanese This is simply not true. As I've pointed out in a sibling comment, Unicode has a lot of surprising and frustrating behaviors with many European languages as well if you use it without locale data. The characters will look right, but e.g. searching, sorting and case-insensitive comparisons will not work as expected if the application is not locale aware.
  - lmm 3y ago
    > The characters will look right, but e.g. searching, sorting and case-insensitive comparisons will not work as expected This is quite a different situation from Japan. A lot of applications don't do searching, sorting, or case-insensitive comparisons, but virtually every application displays text.

jhanschoo 3y ago

> "just use Unicode, all you need is Unicode" dogma is really harmful; a lot of "international" software has become significantly worse for Japanese users since it took hold. The alternative would be that the software used Shift_JIS with a Japanese font. If the software used a Japanese font for Japanese it wouldn't need metadata anyway. There really isn't a problem with Han unification as long as you always switch to a font appropriate for your language; you don't need to configure metadata. If you don't you are always going to run into missing codepoint problems. In cases where the system or user configures the font, properly using Unicode is still easier than configuring alternate encodings for multiple languages.

lmm 3y ago
> The alternative would be that the software used Shift_JIS with a Japanese font. As far as I know all Shift_JIS fonts are Japanese; you would have to be wilfully perverse to make one that wasn't. > If the software used a Japanese font for Japanese it wouldn't need metadata anyway. If it just uses the system default font for that encoding, as almost all software does, then it will also behave correctly. > There really isn't a problem with Han unification as long as you always switch to a font appropriate for your language Right. But approximately no software does that, because if you don't do it then your software will work fine everywhere other than Japan, and even in Japan it will kind-of-sort-of work to the point that a non-native probably won't notice a problem. > In cases where the system or user configures the font, properly using Unicode is still easier than configuring alternate encodings for multiple languages. I'm not convinced it is. Configuring your software to use the right font on a Unicode system is, as far as I can see, at least as hard as configuring your software to use the right encoding on a non-Unicode system. It just fails less obviously when you don't, particularly outside Japan.
- GoblinSlayer 3y ago
  Japanese programs aren't globalized and already rely on the system being fine tuned for Japanese, so default font is already correct.
  - 3y ago