Whoever thought it was acceptable to have a string of text that renders something unreadable or not immediately obvious to the human eye, was a complete moron.

I realize ASCII was limited, but one thing I like about it is I can understand every single character code, and program to handle all the edge cases with certainty.

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kevin_thibedeau 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The tags were needed for language indication to control CJK glyph variants. Flag emoji were grafted onto this scheme. The key is that tag sequences have to start with a valid introductory codepoint. Simple enough to strip out anything that isn't a flag.

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thephyber 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Simple enough to strip out anything that isn't a flag.

But it's not simple enough for every company/app to independently research the entire Unicode code point space (which is MASSIVE) to find out what kinds of "fix ups" that app needs to do to clean the data it consumes.

It's complicated or at least has difficult tradeoffs. Maybe you invest a lot of time carefully surveying all of the Unicode planes and decide which ones you care to keep unchanged and which ones you filter/strip. For every code point you reject or change, there is going to be some user who is confused or dissatisfied with the limitations of your app.

	▲	twoodfin an hour ago \| parent [-]
		“Everyone knew” that in-band signaling was an awful, horribly insecure idea… until we found magic math that couldn’t “think” any other way. I don’t think it’s reasonable to blame the Unicode authors for not anticipating this turn of events.

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embedding-shape 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I realize ASCII was limited, but one thing I like about it is I can understand every single character code

It's great for teaching and other things, but everyday life is filled with many characters, is the suggestion we'd have one ASCII per language where there is more distinct characters, or what would we do? I don't see what else we could have done, that would have worked for the world, but I'm curious to hear ideas.

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thephyber 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The top comment (the Staff Highlighted one) explains why this range of code point exists.

There was a rationale (ISO country codes to modify a flag to display that national flag).

Maybe the problem wasn't the proposal, but the lack of the ability for others to reject it for being insecure.

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SoftTalker 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Even classic ASCII has "unreadable" control codes, but to be fair they would not be confused with text even by an LLM. Well probably not.