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Holy cow CJK unification is a terrible idea. Maybe if it originated from the CJK governments, it might be an OK idea, but the idea of a Western multinationals t
by gerbal 12y ago
Holy cow CJK unification is a terrible idea. Maybe if it originated from the CJK governments, it might be an OK idea, but the idea of a Western multinationals trying to save Unicode space by disregarding the distinctness of a whole language group is idiotic.
The fundamental roll of an institution like the Unicode Consortium is to be descriptive, not prescriptive. If there is a human script, passing certain, low, low thresholds, it should be eligible to be included in its distinct whole in Unicode.
- fixermark 12y agoI don't disagree, while observing that it plays hell with security if (forgive my use of Latin; I don't have a codepoint translator handy) 'bat.com' and 'bat.com' are two different websites because the 'a' in the first is a Chinese-a and the 'a' in the second is a Korean-a. (Of course, this calls into question the wisdom of expanding DNS into the Unicode space in the first place---a space that does nothing like guarantee 1-to-1 association between visual glyph and code for an application that has been built on the assumption that different codes are visually distinguishable. But that ship has sailed).
- mrgriscom 12y agoTo oppose Han unification is to say that an 'a' in English and an 'a' in French should be different code points, because they're different languages. Alternatively, if Unicode directly encoded words, rather than letters, of Western languages akin to ideographs in East Asian languages, it's like arguing that 'color' and 'colour' should be separate code points.
- astrange 12y agoThe Han unification working group (IRG) members were in fact from Asia and appointed by their governments. Why would you think otherwise? Apparently this even includes North Korea.