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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Virtually every Japanese organisation disagrees, you only have to look at a Japanese website to know as much (or are those somehow not "practitioners working with Japanese text"?). Most will use a non-Unicode encoding and/or resort to rendering important text as images, since it's impossible to rely on Unicode text rendering well.

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From here [0], 94.1% of .jp websites use UTF-8 and 6.5% use Shift-JIS. You can find a list of popular sites still using Shift-JIS here [1].

If you change your PC or your phone locale to Japanese and access mostly Japanese website, the font display on most major OS works well. It's probably fair to assume that's a very common setup for Japanese users, and probably for Chinese and Korean users as well.

I think the CJK "problem" is more apparent for international users who don't have the locale setup or dealing with multiple languages plain text at the same time.

[0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/segmentation/tld-jp-/charac...

[1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/en-shiftjis

Your own link shows that both Shift-JIS and EUC-JP are on an upward trend, which isn't what we'd expect if Unicode was succeeding. I can't see it listing examples of .jp sites using UTF-8; would be interesting to see how many of them are relying on text-as-images.

Yeah what lmm says is not what happend/thought in Japan. Japanese still uses Shift_JIS because they love (/s) legacy software. Using Shift_JIS isn't a practical solution.

Random sample of some websites: - Rakuten Bank -> Shift JIS - NHK, the Ministry of Health and Labor Welfare, yahoo japan -> UTF-8

I don't really really know, but this random yahoo answers [0] page seems to agree with me that really you're gonna use UTF-8 for new stuff in general

One point that answer brings up that I hadn't thought of: older flipphones would have good shift-JIS support but not necessarily good unicode support

My guess is that "text as images" might partly be that, partly what you are saying in a legacy sense, and also partly for the same reason old sites in the US would do that: to make something look the way you want and you already have a photoshop render [0]: https://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q14...

I wonder if this can ever be fixed. If basically every Japanese organization disagrees with the Unicode consortium to the point that its undermining the use of unicode in entire countries, it might be worth unwinding CJK normalization.

This isn't the case obviously. Japanese organisations are involved in the Unicode process (something evidenced in the input for the several CJK Unified Ideograph Extensions). Thank to Unicode, many historical characters can be represented in digital text without resorting to placeholders or hacks.

Anecdotally, I've visited a group enthusiastically exploring the possibilities of the then-new CJK Unified Ideograph Extension B in Tokyo over a decade ago. The CJK issue mentioned here was a bigger problem then than now (most developers know how to handle it properly, e.g. with language declarations in HTML etc.).

People will use legacy encodings. That's just a fact of life. Sometimes out of inertia (i.e., it just works, so why bother changing it?), sometimes out of technical limitations of their pipeline, sometimes because of a lack of understanding, rarely out of principle. I'm stuck fixing an issue with some numb skull sending us SAML requests declared as UTF-8 containing some obsolete encoding instead, and this is for Dutch text! This just happens.

There is also nothing wrong with text in Shift-JIS, if that encoding encompasses all characters used.

Ironically my company sends letters fully rendered as raster images, ugh.

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