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Comment by nxrabl | Hacker News Reader

> Editor’s note: SFGATE recognizes the importance of diacritical marks in the Hawaiian language. We are unable to use them due to the limitations of our publishing platform.

I'm struggling to imagine how this can be the case in 2026 on a news website covering, of all places, San Francisco. What COBOL mainframe do they have rendering this page?

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At a guess: The articles are stored in some oldass MySQL DB that doesn't support Unicode, and they've somehow never gotten around to migrating the tables to a new schema.

The default collation on MS SQL Server didn’t support Unicode until some fairly recent releases. Even though the database itself fully supported Unicode (you just had to pick a different collation).

So it’s entirely possible that they are using a fully up-to-date database, but the software depends on using a database collation that doesn’t support Unicode. I’ve seen software like that in active use even now. It can definitely get frustrating, and it’s not that hard to fix if you can just get some management buyin.

Yes, thank you -- I didn't express it very well.

They say that as if that makes it ok.

Calling attention to it kind of makes it worse. If they didn’t have that note anyone who saw and was bothered could chalk it up to them not caring or not knowing like so many other publications would be. But by dropping this statement at the end, they’re saying they know, they’re claiming they care, they just don’t care enough to actually fix their systems to handle apparently anything other than ascii text despite the fact that even if that was all they could store in their database HTML has support for Unicode escape sequences and they could use that.

So it gets a little weirder too because here[1] is an article on their site where they are very clearly using a diacritical character in the main body of the text for "Hernándas" which means whatever backend they're using must support something other than plain ascii. If it was Latin-1 or a similar code page that might explain why they couldn't use the "macron" or "overline" diacritic characters directly, but it doesn't explain why they couldn't just use the HTML escape sequences then, since they can clearly inject them like they did between "Kau Desert" in the Hawaii article.

And while it doesn't say what their backend can do, certainly if you edit in the &#773 escape sequence after the U into the page HTML it seems work, so nothing in the page content itself would make them unable to display the characters. Just makes their note all the more strange.

[1]: https://www.sfgate.com/sports/article/alcantara-gets-another...

As penance we should infill said hole with San Francisco. Pretty much fits with room to spare.

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