4 ms·
It may not be so infuriating when you consider how important names are to Japanese people. Breaking your name is unacceptable and breaking it because of a techn
by ejr 12y ago
It may not be so infuriating when you consider how important names are to Japanese people. Breaking your name is unacceptable and breaking it because of a technical convenience chosen during development would be deeply offensive on top of being unacceptable.
Until Unicode stops breaking people's names, it will continue to be the one standard for Japanese systems on and offline. Even when(if?) it stops breaking Japanese names, it will take a very, very long time to roll over existing systems and that's precluding unforeseen problems during the conversion.
We should stop before we take the "not following standard" = "broken" ideology. Especially when we consider whom the standard serves best.
Edit: By "it will continue to be the one standard for Japanese" in the 2nd paragraph, I meant ShiftJIS not Unicode. That looked a bit unclear.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- fenomas 12y agoWhat do you mean by saying that Unicode breaks people's names? The problem isn't that there's anything wrong with Unicode, the problem is that it's not possible to unambiguously convert text from SJIS to unicode and back again, because SJIS has some duplicate mappings for historical reasons (compatibility with different pre-existing encodings as I recall). The same would presumably be true of converting SJIS to any other encoding that didn't have the same duplicated code points.
- phkahler 12y ago>> because SJIS has some duplicate mappings for historical reasons I think that's the problem. Sounds like unicode has some duplicate mapping. Never mind the "historical reasons", it's broken.
- jessaustin 12y agoWhy does Unicode get to decide what "duplicate" means in this context? If Mr. Smythe is addressed as "Mr. Smith" in a letter from his bank, is he going to be mollified by the explanation that Unicode considers his preferred representation to be a duplicate?
- fenomas 12y agoUnicode didn't decide anything like that, the characters were duplicates per SJIS itself. SJIS intentionally has duplicate mappings in order to be compatible with vendor encodings that put the same character in different places. Basically, the characters in Unicode are a superset of what you'd find in any single Japanese encoding. The problem is that it mashes many of them together with characters you'd find in C or K encodings.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y agoAs a monolingual white person, my name is kind of important to me too.