Hacker News Reader

Comment by birn559 | Hacker News Reader

I don't see why it should. I also believe parent is wrong as there are unambiguous rules about when to use ß or ss.

Never thought of it but maybe there are rules that allow to visually present the code point for ß as ss? At least (from experience as a user) there seem to be a singular "ss" codepoint.

View on HN

>also believe parent is wrong as there are unambiguous rules about when to use ß or ss.

I never said it was ambiguous, I said it depends on the unicode version and the font you are using. How is that wrong? (Seems like the capital of ß is still SS in the latest unicode but since ẞ is the preferred capital version now this should change in the future)

> How is that wrong? Not sure where, how or if it's defined as part of Unicode, but so far I assumed that for a Unicode grapheme there exists a notion of what the visual representation should look like. If Unicode still defines capital of ß as SS that's an error in Unicode due to slow adaption of the changes in the German language.

"ß as SS that's an error in Unicode"

It's not. Uppercase of ß has always been SS.

Before we had a separate codepoint in Unicode this caused problems with round-tripping between upper and lower case. So Unicode rightfully introduced a separate codepoint specifically for that use case in 2008.

This inspired designers to design a glyph for that codepoint looking similar to ß. Nothing wrong with that.

Some liked the idea and it got some foothold, so in 2017, the Council for German Orthography allowed it as an acceptable variant.

Maybe it will win, maybe not, but for now in standard German the uppercase of ß is still SS and Unicode rightfully reflects that.

In unicode the default is still SS [1] while the Germans seem to have changed it to ẞ [2]. That means now it's the same on every system, but once the unicode standard changes and some systems get updated and others not there will be different behavior of len("ß".upper()) around.

I don't know how or if systems deal with this, but ß should be printed as ss if ß is unavailable in the font. It's possible this is completely up to the user.

[1] https://unicode.org/faq/casemap_charprop.html [2] https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/DOX/RfdR_Amtliches-Regelwerk...

"In unicode the default is still SS [1] while the Germans seem to have changed it to ẞ [2]."

Where does the source corroborate that claim? Can you give is a hint where to find the source?

page 48: > E3: Bei Schreibung mit Großbuchstaben ist neben der Verwendung des Groß buchstabens ẞ auch die Schreibung SS möglich: Straße – STRAẞE – STRASSE.

While in older versions [1] it was the other way around:

> E3: Bei Schreibung mit Großbuchstaben schreibt man SS. Daneben ist auch die Verwendung des Großbuchstabens ẞ möglich. Beispiel: Straße – STRASSE – STRAẞE.

[1] https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/DOX/rfdr_Regeln_2016_redigie...

ẞ is not the preferred capital version, it is an acceptable variant (according to the Council for German Orthography).

well I don't speak german, I was asking

I see, wasn't clear to me on what level you were asking. The letter ß has never been generally equivalent to ss in the German language.

From a user experience perspective though it might be beneficial to pretend that "ß" == "ss" holds when parsing user input.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com