Hacker News Reader

Comment by h2s | Hacker News Reader

My point was that Unicode is newer than ASCII, and that we can't hope to deal with Unicode (Ö) properly if we can't even cope with ASCII (') yet. Nothing to do with anglocentrism at all. I agree that there are lots of annoying computing problems for non-English speakers though.

View on HN

What I tried to say is that dealing with ASCII is meaningless; it's not even a useful starting point.

For the majority of people, a string format that accepts 100% of ASCII but 0.1% of Unicode is just as useless as one that only accepts 95% of ASCII. Therefore the goal should never be to get your ASCII coverage from 95% of 100%.

There are two issues here: one is not accepting Unicode properly, and the other is making incorrect assumptions about the content of strings. Both need to be resolved, and all this cultural butthurt is not productive to solving either of them.

Resolving the Unicode issues is undeniably a higher priority for speakers of foreign languages, but there are still plenty of languages and libraries whose support for Unicode ranges from nonexistent, to antiquated, to limited, to just plain broken.

There's nothing application developers can do in the short term to fix those problems, but by examining their own code and removing fallacious assumptions they can better facilitate the proper handling of Unicode once it becomes available in their underlying technologies. In the mean time, though, they may only have ASCII, or ISO 8859-X, or KOI8-R, or Shift-JIS, etc. to test with.

The ISO-8859-1 ASCII-based character encoding contains an Ö, too. That's not even Unicode. It may not be in the first seven bits of the ASCII alphabet, but it's so widely implemented that not supporting it is just as ridiculous as not supporting the apostrophe.

The problem is that there are so many standards for what characters 128-255 stand for.

there are literally hundreds of codepages http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/

The first A in ASCII stands for American, so it does have quite a bit to do with anglocentrism.

This is excessively literal and ignores the actual technical problems and circumstances in a global context related to ASCII and unicode. North Korea calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Does that mean South Korea is, necessarily, part of the DPRK, since that's what its acronym suggests?

I have no idea what you're talking about.

The first A in Ascii stands for American. This is because it was an American standard, created by and for Americans. Who pretty much all speak English (and spend dollars $!). What about ascii isn't anglocentric?

His point is perfectly viable. If Americans for some reason spoke Romanian, then the ASCII standard would also contain letters such as 'Â','â' (perhaps pushing out some special characters for them), so that Americans would be able to write Romanian on it. ASCII is the way it is because it is convenient for English speakers; it is not the way it is because it is for some reason harder to encode 'Â' then it is to encode 'A'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com