“Unicode is crazy complicated, but that is because of the crazy ambition it has in representing all of human language, not because of any deficiency in the standard itself.”
I would argue that the “crazy ambition” is, in and of itself, a deficiency in the standard. Unicode’s complexity has given rise to things like security vulnerabilities and a character set which adds arbitrarily chosen pictograms to itself every few years, all for the sake of a massive set of features, most which which very few people actually end up using. I find the original goal of Unicode far more admirable than what it’s become today:
Unicode is intended to address the need for a workable, reliable world text encoding. Unicode could be roughly described as “wide-body ASCII” that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the world’s living languages […] Unicode gives higher priority to ensuring utility for the future than to preserving past antiquities.
That sounds pretty in-line with Unicode today to me. They even admit that preservation of past antiquities and “all the world’s living languages”. I certainly don’t think Unicode has put lesser priority on future utility than past antiquity, e.g.
“Unicode is crazy complicated, but that is because of the crazy ambition it has in representing all of human language, not because of any deficiency in the standard itself.”
I would argue that the “crazy ambition” is, in and of itself, a deficiency in the standard. Unicode’s complexity has given rise to things like security vulnerabilities and a character set which adds arbitrarily chosen pictograms to itself every few years, all for the sake of a massive set of features, most which which very few people actually end up using. I find the original goal of Unicode far more admirable than what it’s become today:
That sounds pretty in-line with Unicode today to me. They even admit that preservation of past antiquities and “all the world’s living languages”. I certainly don’t think Unicode has put lesser priority on future utility than past antiquity, e.g.
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