3 ms·
> CJK is not some obscure alphabet. Right. One would think that misrendering a major world language used by over 100 million people would be an issue that warr
by lmm 3y ago
> CJK is not some obscure alphabet.
Right. One would think that misrendering a major world language used by over 100 million people would be an issue that warrants some attention. But too many of the HN crowd don't care.
> In this case, perfect is enemy of good.
It's not though. Unicode-only is not just imperfect, it's an outright regression for Japanese. Meanwhile traditional encoding-aware programs render Japanese just fine.
- mnau 3y ago> It's not though. Unicode-only is not just imperfect, it's an outright regression for Japanese. Unicode has variant selectors which can deal with region variants (e.g. https://imgur.com/a/syMcWNO https://imgur.com/a/syMcWNO) to deal with the issue. Granted, it's not very widely used, but Unicode provided a solution. The onus is now on application developers and font providers. Choosing to limit number of characters to 2 bytes was a good technical choice back in 1992, non-unified CJK wouldn't fit (that was a time of 2-4MB RAM and 100-200MB HDD). A solution to problem was later provided. Using Shift-JIS is like doing on-IP, non-UDP protocol on the internet. Sure, you can do it, but it's just non-perspective choice. A better invested time is on improving standard protocol, which is Unicode (e.g. conversion software).
- lmm 3y ago> Unicode has variant selectors which can deal with region variants (e.g. https://imgur.com/a/syMcWNO https://imgur.com/a/syMcWNO) to deal with the issue. They're officially deprecated and cause issues with breaking search etc.. So they're still below feature parity with using a traditional encoding. Traditional encoding support is also easier to test since documents with traditional encodings are more widespread and exist for many world languages, not just Japanese.