20 ms·
Why is unicode support so bad in 2013?
by xentronium 14y ago
Why is unicode support so bad in 2013?
- ygra 14y agoBecause every implementation of anything has certain assumptions and when you're not someone who regularly juggles different scripts at once it's easy to miss a lot of things (e.g. blindly assuming that everything is ASCII). Also part of the problem was U+0027 and its use as a quote character in shell scripts. So that was not a Unicode issue but rather a shell script injection issue and programmers do that all the time (although usually with SQL, I guess).
- roel_v 14y agoBecause it's so much work for so little return.
- zokier 14y agoYou might ask why shell scripting and string escaping are so bad in 2013 as well. Those have couple of decades more history behind them after all.
- edwintorok 14y agoNot all Unicode characters are indexed by search engines, for example the 😻 is not indexed apparently: http://lwn.net/Articles/545993/ http://lwn.net/Articles/545993/
- Millennium 14y agoIt's basically Y2K without the sense of urgency. People assumed ASCII, or at least single-byte supersets of ASCII, would pretty much be the norm, so they never bothered with anything else. And since there are no apocalypse nutters breathing down people's necks to fix it, it often gets deprioritized. Plan 9 actually tried to do something about this: it assumed Unicode for everything, and invented their own encoding for the process. The OS didn't work out so well (regrettably), but we still use their encoding: it's called UTF-8 now. Still a superset of ASCII, I guess, but at least we've gotten beyond the single-byte assumption.
- fusiongyro 14y agoIt's kind of a dull problem, unfortunately. I think this is also why so many of the XML standards are poorly implemented.