Unicode Teaching in Universities

[Martin J. Dürst]

Hello Doug, others,

On 2021-09-03 02:30, Doug Ewell via Unicode wrote:
> Phake Nick wrote:
> 
>> but in recent years I feel like I have hear more about the downside
>> of using the Unicode system as a tool developed from early era of
>> computing before internet became popular and the use of such system
>> to digitalize the entire world's text,
> 
> It would be interesting to hear specifically what the "downside" is. Maybe Phake Nick can elaborate, or ask those who are unhappy with Unicode to elaborate.

I'll answer Nick's complaints separately.

> Does the fact that Unicode was originally developed more than 30 years ago (I guess that's the "early era") bother people? How does "before internet became popular" play into this? A universal character set, free from the context-sensitive character set switching used in the JIS X standards, should be an ideal solution for the Internet.

Both the Internet and Unicode became popular more or less during the 
same time, with mutual synergies. They were both created with a global, 
long-term outlook.

> Are users in Japan still concerned about Japanese characters requiring 3 bytes in UTF-8 as opposed to 2 bytes in the JIS X standards?

Not really. These days, video uses much more memory, so memory for text 
is usually not a concern. Terabytes are cheap.

> Does UTF-8's immunity from cross-site scripting attacks not outweigh this for Web purposes?

There are a lot of other advantages of Unicode/UTF-8 that outweigh this, 
not only for Web purposes.

> Do they still want to use out-of-band character-set designators as font selection hints? Are there still objections to CJK unification? And so on.

People in Japan are very pragmatic. Unicode works, and so they don't see 
any reasons to complain or object. The fear that "Unicode will destroy 
Japanese kanji", spread in the 1990 by some, clearly hasn't come true 
(as quite some people knew already then).

Regards,   Martin.