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Comment by joosters | Hacker News Reader

That's just because the browser doesn't handle unicode well. The 'text-only', 'VGA' and 'textmode' are actually irrelevant. The behaviour you are seeing is down to programmer choice/laziness/missing support.

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If you're only expecting ASCII text, then not being able to show anything else could even be considered a feature to reduce attack area, since any sort of Unicode trickery then becomes impossible.

There are more languages in the world than English, not supporting Unicode is not an option for most.

Yes, but thread OP was essentially saying "look how those chars appear when you can only render ASCII." And then the person you replied to said that explicitly.

I'd wager that both of them know there are more languages than English.

So what happens when you try to display Chinese or Hindi text? You're just going to get a screen of stars, like you would with unicode square boxes.

"If you're only expecting ASCII text" categorically excludes trying to display Chinese or Hindi text from the program's specification.

   s/text-only/ASCII-only, no Javascript/
   s/browser/& I use/
   s/in VGA textmode//

@userbinator is correct; I often find this is advantageous for me and neither need nor want Unicode "support" in ths program; I have other programs I use to view non-ASCII characters if the need arises.

I am in agreement with this programmers choices, for the most part. Certainly I agree with this one.

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