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Unicode proves again that it went too far with fringe cultural things and left many landmines for us to step on. It’s a necessity solved at the completely wrong

by wruza 2y ago

Unicode proves again that it went too far with fringe cultural things and left many landmines for us to step on. It’s a necessity solved at the completely wrong level. Text never had hidden characters (neither emojis), now people and text engines have to fight with this nonsense, on per-program basis. Thanks, unicode. Here’s a visible thumb up emoji for you: (sorry if you can’t see it, that’s HN not me)

crazygringo 2y ago
Hindsight is 20/20. But the idea of including language tags isn't crazy, especially when things like sort order and capitalization in Unicode are language-specific.
- wruza 2y ago
  We whined about emoji combining and other nonsense since introduction. Who would listen though, now sanitize. This idea isn’t crazy, yes. It is useful. But it was implemented in the wrong place. Unicode is neither RTF nor HTML. You can’t stuff everything text-related into it until it cracks. It had one job: unfuck codepages and cjk. Should have stopped when it was done, without all that klingon tolkien flags bs. Emojis could live as some escape sequence standard like they did before. And language specifics as sgml-like tags. We don’t have “just text” with all that either way, so what was the point of spoiling the only raw text standard with that? It became a format with binary tags, complex and unpredictable as hell.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    > without all that klingon tolkien Can you elaborate? I just searched and can't find anything related to Klingon or Tolkien in Unicode... I definitely agree that would go too far. But has it, am I missing something?
    - wruza 2y ago
      Spoke from memory, Klingon was rejected it seems, Cirth/Tengwar is a 2023 proposal, fresh and again. https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/#:~:text=160,(Tengwar) https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/#:~:text=160,(Tengwar) Anyways, I stand corrected on this.

by wruza 2y ago

crazygringo 2y ago

Hindsight is 20/20. But the idea of including language tags isn't crazy, especially when things like sort order and capitalization in Unicode are language-specific.

wruza 2y ago
We whined about emoji combining and other nonsense since introduction. Who would listen though, now sanitize. This idea isn’t crazy, yes. It is useful. But it was implemented in the wrong place. Unicode is neither RTF nor HTML. You can’t stuff everything text-related into it until it cracks. It had one job: unfuck codepages and cjk. Should have stopped when it was done, without all that klingon tolkien flags bs. Emojis could live as some escape sequence standard like they did before. And language specifics as sgml-like tags. We don’t have “just text” with all that either way, so what was the point of spoiling the only raw text standard with that? It became a format with binary tags, complex and unpredictable as hell.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  > without all that klingon tolkien Can you elaborate? I just searched and can't find anything related to Klingon or Tolkien in Unicode... I definitely agree that would go too far. But has it, am I missing something?
  - wruza 2y ago
    Spoke from memory, Klingon was rejected it seems, Cirth/Tengwar is a 2023 proposal, fresh and again. https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/#:~:text=160,(Tengwar) https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/smp/#:~:text=160,(Tengwar) Anyways, I stand corrected on this.