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Comment by feelin_googley | Hacker News Reader

   Zero-width characters are invisible, `non-printing' characters that are
   not displayed by the majority of applications. F*or exam*ple, I've
   ins*erted 10 ze*ro-width spa*ces in*to thi*s sentence, c*an you tel**l?
   (Hint: paste the sentence into Diff Checker to see the locations of the
   characters!). These characters can be used to `fingerprint' text for
   certain users.

Above is what paragraph looks like in text-only browser in VGA textmode.

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That's just because the browser doesn't handle unicode well. The 'text-only', 'VGA' and 'textmode' are actually irrelevant. The behaviour you are seeing is down to programmer choice/laziness/missing support.

If you're only expecting ASCII text, then not being able to show anything else could even be considered a feature to reduce attack area, since any sort of Unicode trickery then becomes impossible.

There are more languages in the world than English, not supporting Unicode is not an option for most.

Yes, but thread OP was essentially saying "look how those chars appear when you can only render ASCII." And then the person you replied to said that explicitly.

I'd wager that both of them know there are more languages than English.

So what happens when you try to display Chinese or Hindi text? You're just going to get a screen of stars, like you would with unicode square boxes.

"If you're only expecting ASCII text" categorically excludes trying to display Chinese or Hindi text from the program's specification.

   s/text-only/ASCII-only, no Javascript/
   s/browser/& I use/
   s/in VGA textmode//

@userbinator is correct; I often find this is advantageous for me and neither need nor want Unicode "support" in ths program; I have other programs I use to view non-ASCII characters if the need arises.

I am in agreement with this programmers choices, for the most part. Certainly I agree with this one.

Links 2.8 <http://links.twibright.com/> also shows the non-printing characters as big black asterisks. But Emacs doesn't show them in text-mode, have to switch to hexl-mode.

Yeah but so what? Almost exactly 0 people use text-mode browsers.

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