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Comment by lifthrasiir | Hacker News Reader

I guess some questions may have been answered in the previous HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022906

I haven't said much about my personal feeling in that discussion, but honestly speaking as a Korean, I do feel that some Japaneses weigh too much on exact glyphs. These variant glyphs are indeed "wrong", but so does many non-standard shorthands (e.g. ⿸广マ as a shorthand of 魔) or individual preferences (e.g. the first character of Yoshinoya 𠮷野家 is an unusual variant of 吉). Why some are okay while others aren't? I'm yet to hear plausible justifications for this disparity.

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вє¢αυѕє ιт ƒєєℓѕ ℓιкє яєα∂ιηg єηgℓιѕн тєχт тнαт ℓσσкѕ ℓιкє тнιѕ! It might still be legible, but in some contexts (e.g. official) it's reasonable to want your language to be accurately represented.

Not to mention sometimes you also get kana displaying in a Japanese font and kanji displaying in a stylistically different Chinese font and it looks awful.

Awful at worst, I should say. And as others said, correct uses of `lang` attributes and system-default preferences alleviate most stylistic issues. It looks awful only when applications have a mismatching preference (e.g. Japanese websites that never think about Chinese users).

广+マ can stand for more than one character. That's the fatal problem with CJK unification in general. It takes the correctly entered language character X and replaces it with CJK character Y and then everyone gets confused

⿸广マ is indeed a shorthand for multiple characters due to its phono-semantic construction, but many simplification attempts also had similar ambiguities. ⿸广マ in this sense is just a new character that has multiple meanings from the context. Z-variants merged by the CJK unification are much more subtle than this example.

My point is the same. Your text should be recorded and displayed as you entered it, especially when that can lead to confusion.

> , but many simplification attempts also had similar ambiguities.

No one asked to have our languages changed by Unicode

The first Japanese character set was JIS X 0201, which only had half-width katakanas. It is absurd in the modern standard, lacking all hiragana and kanji, and looks really awful (so much that they are used for comical effects today). I'd argue that JIS X 0201 is an extremely radical attempt compared to the Han unification---so why should the Han unification be blamed alone?

My apologies for having higher expectations of computers in 2023 than computers from the 1960s

That doesn't sound fair to me given that the Han unification occurred around 1990...

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