3 ms·

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.