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Comment by JulianMorrison | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but if your name doesn't fit into Unicode, you need a new name. You do not have the right to your own character encoding and font (on someone else's website).

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Anticipation of this comment was, in a nutshell, the reason the Han unification debate in Unicode got so acrimonious, and why lots of Japanese people carry a chip on their shoulder about it to this day.

"Sorry, grandma, I know you've been sort of attached to your name for the last 80 years, but the white folks find it inconvenient for their computer systems. Don't worry, they promise they'll make something close for you."

Many of the clients of my ex-day job are married to legacy encodings like Shift-JIS precisely because they do think that their customers and students have a "right" to having their names written correctly. (Most of them also make a total hash out of foreigner's names, which I spent a good deal of time correcting. As far as I know my office probably still uses my name as test data, since it screws up about 80% of the systems we had, and it was cheaper to work around or patch than it was to fire me.)

Unicode is incomplete, and this is the fault of people who it doesn't serve? Developers don't have the right to dictate how people write their names just because they have created a poor implementation.

The best solution is suggested in the other link: apologise for the technical limitations and offer a workaround. Don't demand that the world breaks solely to fit into your technical limitation.

Is this supposed to be a modern version of "I'm sorry but if your name doesn't fit into 7-bit ASCII, you need a new name"?

Similar, except that there are a lot fewer people whose names can't be written in Unicode. Hell, the vast majority of names fit in the Basic Multilingual Plane; you could probably get away with using a fixed 16 bits per character.

If your name doesn't fit into Unicode, get a nickname. Bonus points if your nickname fits into 7-bit ASCII.

Right, but what's the point of Unicode then? What it's supposed to be: "Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language." What it is: The above, plus "Well, almost every character. Sorry we couldn't fit your name there, perhaps you should consider a nickname."

Say you want to order a package from somewhere. How does getting a nickname help? How do you explain it to the post office? I know it sounds like nitpicking, and it probably is, until it affects you personally. I've had my share of "name-mangling" and my name does fit into Unicode (not into ASCII though).

You have a point, but what I'm most concerned with is balancing these two things:

1. I don't want to inconvenience people with "weird" names.

2. I don't want to burden application programmers too much.

Requiring everybody to have a simple ASCII name would be convenient for programmers, but would be a big hassle for people whose names don't meet those requirements. "Be in the Basic Multilingual Plane or get a nickname" is a policy that, I think, provides a reasonable balance. Of course, supporting all of unicode isn't really that much harder, so I think that's a better balance.

There are people who insist on a particular capitalisation of their names (i.e., all lower-case, irrespective of grammar rules) which is surely no different from using characters outside the Unicode set.

I'd be very careful telling people what "rights" they have around their names.

EDIT: you can't really control what other people call you but you certainly can control what you call yourself.

"which is surely no different from using characters outside the Unicode set" - not when you are thinking in terms of making a program that will support it. A program will happily render Mr bob smith's name in lower-case if that's how he entered it. But Ms non-Unicode-squiggle is out of luck, and I don't have much sympathy.

Yea, how could 80 year old Ms non-Unicode-squiggle's parents have been so cruel and thoughtless that they didn't check the unicode spec before naming their child. Screw them and their lack of foresight and time machines.

I'm sort of wondering how Ms non-Unicode-squiggle manages to type her non-Unicode-squiggle into the form field in the first place.

There are other encoding systems than Unicode out there.

Sure; I was reacting to the specific concept of a "non-Unicode-squiggle", implying that the character has no known mechanism for encoding it (i.e. it's not simply an SJIS squiggle) and would likely have to be submitted as a custom bitmap/vector path. That's a good place to draw the line.

The whole point is that there are characters in use in certain languages that have accepted mechanisms for encoding in some non-Unicode character encoding system used for that language, but not in Unicode.

The artist formerly known as Prince?

Perhaps the actress from "Orlando" could start calling herself ~Swinton? Or maybe just "~"?

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