Comment by weinzierl

Comment by weinzierl 12 hours ago

8 replies

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I wouldn’t be so harsh. I think the Unicode Consortium not only started with good intentions but also did excellent work for the first decade or so.

I just think they got distracted when the problems got harder, and instead of tackling them head-on, they now waste a lot of their resources on busywork - good intentions notwithstanding. Sure, it’s more fun standardizing sparkling disco balls than dealing with real-world pain points. That OpenType is a good and powerful standard which masks some of Unicode’s shortcomings doesn’t really help.

It’s not too late, and I hope they will find their way back to their original mission and be braver in solving long-standing issues.

zahlman 11 hours ago

A big part of the problem is that the reaction to early updates was so bad that they promised they would never un-assign or re-assign a code point ever again, making it impossible for them to actually correct any mistakes (not even typos in the official standard names given to characters).

The versioning is actually almost completely backwards by semver reasoning; 1.1 should have been 2.0, 2.0 should have been 3.0 and we should still be on 3.n now (since they have since kept the promise not to remove anything).

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yk 11 hours ago

I would. The original sin of Unicode is really their manifold idea, at that point they stopped trying to write a string standard and started to become a kinda general description of how string standards should look like and hopefully string standards that more or less conform to this description are interoperable if you remember which direction "string".decode() and "string".encode() is.

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socalgal2 11 hours ago

What could be better? Human languages are complex

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  • weinzierl 11 hours ago

    Yes, exactly, human languages are complex and in my opinion Unicode used to be on a good track to tackle these complexities. I just think that nowadays they are not doing enough to help people around the world solving these problems.

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  • pas 6 hours ago

    sure, but they have both human and machine stuff in the same "universe" - again, sure, it made sense, but maybe it would make sense to have a parser that helps to recover "human stuff" from "machine gibberish" (ie. filter out the presentation and control stuff), but, but, of course some in-band logic makes sense, after all, for the combinations (diacritics, emoji skin color, and so on).

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