Unicode/ Discussion

mAsterdam: Somebody put the following advice at Text Formatting Rules:

• Try to avoid using special Unicode characters - some people will not see them.

it was changed into:

• Be aware that not everyone can display Unicode

Does anybody know when Unicode got supported in browsers? I mean as an indication of how many people will actually not see them. I think Unicode is a good thing. The use of it should not be discouraged. Because I don't really know who is affected, I wasn't sure the advice should be removed.

TJ: Maybe a good enough reason to avoid unicode is that it still shows as unicode and not the character in edit mode and on diff pages.

mAsterdam I strongly disagree. Every new communication standard more or less disqualifies tools. If the community would not accept that as a temporary inconvenience we would still only be using codes like Baudot code. Even that standard would not have been established.

Froese: I added the advice. Netscape 4.7x and w3m only show a question mark for unknown Unicode characters and lynx the raw code number. Even if a browser supports Unicode that doesn't mean that it can display all possible glyphs. Besides, the wiki puts a "charset=iso-8859-1" in the header...

Neil: The document's character set should have no impact on one's ability to represent any character with an XML entity: I can say 囲碁 By typing 囲碁

Though I don't seem to know how to get an entity into the wiki. :-)

So how are people getting the stuff into the wiki then?

Sebastian: In Windows XP, you can simply use the Character Map. Or, if you install Japanese or Chinese language support, you can enter them comfortably with the IME. If you want to enter it by unicode number you have to enter it in decimal form, such as 囲&30849; for 囲碁

I would like to question the arguments made against Unicode. Go is an international game and uses many terms from Japanese and other languages. If you want to refer to an Asian term, there is just no better way than using Unicode. Unicode has become the standard for international fonts. A policy that discourages the use of these characters would be unworthy of our culturally diverse and broad-minded community.

I agree however, that authors should be aware that not every system configuration may be able to read them yet and nobody should rely on the assumption that everybody can read them. Using Unicode (such as Japanese script) to illustrate and clarify a (transliterated) term is good. Using it instead of the term is bad.

Neil: OK, so we need the wiki fixed to handle the full range of possible entities. :-)

RueLue: If someone wants to avoid problems, which arose in the last days (12-'06) with special characters of some languages, may use
unicode in HTML, german 'Umlauts' (see page in edit mode):
gross - Ae - Ä -- Oe - Ö -- Ue - Ü
klein - ae - ä -- oe - ö -- ue - ü
sz ('Ligatur') - ß
see also selfhtml (german page, but special characters for some languages)