Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

> You can't expect every platform to have an up to date database of every novel combination.

On modern desktop OSes and smart phones, I do expect my platform to have an up-to-date unicode database & font set. Certainly for something like the unicode polar bear, which was added in 2020. I'll begrudgingly look the other way for terminals, embedded systems and maybe video games... but generally it should just work everywhere.

Server code generally shouldn't interact with unicode grapheme clusters at all. I'm struggling to think of any common, valid reason to use a unicode character database in 'normal' backend server code.

> Another good one is grandfathered symbols with both a text and emoji presentation and forcing the chosen glyph with the variant selector prefix.

I didn't know about that one. I'll have to try it out.

View on HN

> I'm struggling to think of any common, valid reason to use a unicode character database in 'normal' backend server code.

Case insensitive search

Unicode gets used in places that aren't continuousky updated. Good luck showing a pirate flag emoji on an embedded device like an infotainment system.

I thing being continuously updated should be tied to receiving new external content.

It's fine to have an embedded device that's never updated, but never receives new content - it doesn't matter that a system won't be able to show a new emoji because it doesn't have any content that uses that new emoji.

However, if it is expected to display new and updated content from the internet, then the system itself has to be able to get updated and actually get updated, there's no acceptable excuses for that - if it's going to pull new content, it must also pull new updates for itself.

As the user/owner of the device, no thanks. It should have code updates if and only if I ask it to, which I probably won't unless you have some compelling reason. For the device owner, pulling new updates by itself is just a built in backdoor/RCE exploit, and in practice those backdoors are often used maliciously. I'd much rather my devices have no way to update and boot from ROM.

So like a CD player needs some way to get updates? I guess they could send out CDs with updates but approximately nobody would actually do that.

The fact that we have to go as far back as CD players for a decent example illustrates my point - the "CD player" content distribution model is long dead, effectively nobody sells CD players or devices like CD players, effectively nobody distributes digital content on CDs or things like CDs (like, CD sales are even below vinyl sales) - almost every currently existing product receives content through a channel where updates could trivially be sent as well.

And if we're talking about how new products should be designed, then the "almost" goes away and they 100% wouldn't receive new content through anything like CDs, the issue transforms from an irrelevant niche (like CDs nowadays) to a nonexistent one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com