Unicode Backlash
Yesterday, I stumbled upon a blog that made me laugh. The truth be told, I have a snarky side—my evil twin, if you will. I keep it in check. Mostly. Some of you who will understand. Some of you won’t. It’s a Gemini thing.
My twin is fun but good luck putting it back in its cage. And believe me, for every dollar of fun you get, you’ll pay ten dollars in social disaster. Best to keep the twin in check.
But yesterday, I stumbled upon Ted Dziuba’s blog and—holy smokes—my twin was rattling its cage! Ted’s rant on unicode is spot on. I’ll further say, unicode is super-important only to people for whom unicode is super-important. If you’re backend services only understand ASCII then unicode is anti-important.
For example, YouTube is happy with 无法停下 as are most of the online music services. But that cost money, believe it. If you can make do with ASCII, you’ll save money and a lot of headache.
Oh, how did I stumble upon Ted’s place? Saw his scalability article in the Hot Links list on highscalability.
My twin rip snorted.