Imagine no Unicode, It’s easy if you try, No bytes that bloat our systems, No errors make us cry.
Imagine all the coders, Living life in ASCII…
Imagine no emojis, Just letters, plain and true, No accents to confuse us, No glyphs in Sanskrit too.
Imagine all the programs, Running clean and fast…
You may say I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, And encoding wars will be done.
I can appreciate the funny lyrics, but in real life I appreciate being able to write in my own language on a computer. Or even a mix of my language and another non-English language!
> in real life I appreciate being able to write in my own language on a computer.
I do too, which is why I hate the "unicode only for everything everywhere" narrative that's taken hold. My language can't be written properly in Unicode, so support for traditional codepages and encodings is really important!
What language is that? Given that there are glyphs for Ancient Egyptian in Unicode now, the claim that there's a language you can't write in Unicode needs some backing :)
I presume they mean Han unification[0], which to an uneducated outsider sure sounds like a fuckup. I wonder if it's possible to fix it inside Unicode without throwing the rest of it away. Reserve new blocks for all the needed graphemes and deprecate the unified ones?
Japanese. If you try to write it in Unicode you get (in the overwhelming majority of applications) Chinese and some vaporware excuses about font regions.
Imagine no emojis, Just letters, plain and true, No accents to confuse us, No glyphs in Sanskrit too. Imagine all the programs, Running clean and fast…
You may say I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, And encoding wars will be done.