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Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

Am I right in assuming fixing this in player names etc makes Chinese look wrong? It’s an easier problem if you know the whole page is Japanese, but how about things like game lobbies, where every username is in a different language?

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Either store the locale used when a user enters their name and then use it to mark up the text whenever you display the username, or simply use the system default, so Japanese users will see Chinese names with Japanese glyphs and Chinese users will see Japanese names with Chinese glyphs. Other users randomly get whatever.

The locale might be set to something completely different. A lot of programmers run their machines in English and not in their native language. One could use location to detect which variant to use, but that too wouldn’t work for, say, Chinese speakers in Japan. In ideal world we should use the locale of an input source (if the user sets their keyboard to Traditional Chinese we should use it for that fragment of text). However, operating systems and browsers don’t provide the input source locale API.

> The locale might be set to something completely different.

Follow the choice of user, please.

Locale: English. Text input: 刃

Question: was that a Japanese or Chinese character?

Answer: locale doesn’t help us here, unsolvable problem.

Good point. Would it be feasible to check the locale used at profile creation time, then store that locale alongside the username if it contains at least one CJK glyph?

What if a player with a German locale used their favorite anime character’s name? How do you know whether to use Chinese or Japanese characters on somebody else’s PC? Even a Chinese player should see Japanese characters there. But you would first of all basically need to ask the German player with a drop down menu which language their name is in, which will never happen, so we just assume Chinese. It’s just broken.

I think we clearly need an in-band solution. Some character that switches the Asian glyph variant, or separate characters altogether. The former would be annoying for non-variable sized Unicode because you’d lose the ability to use random access into a large corpus of text, because you’d need to scan the entire text to find out the current Asian glyph variant mode.. sigh

Ultimately there are situations that aren't really fixable. People often mix languages in chat messages.

There's some similar issues with right to left, and left to right text. You can give people a good default, and try to be smart, but some cases will always be ugly.

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