Re: [csswg-drafts] Backslash & Yen sign behavior (#6848)

This is a well-known annoyance here in Japan. 

The origin of the problem is that in the Japanese version of ISO 646, the backslash and the tilde are replaced by the Yen sign (for the currency) and the overbar (macron, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macron_(diacritic)). Most variants of ISO 646 died out with the introduction of ISO 8859; in Europe, the costs of changing to a cross-country encoding was easy to justify.
In Japan, the Yen sign (and the macron) remained, and got integrated into multibyte encodings, in particular Shift_JIS. When ASCII and later Unicode become popular, it was clear to the people involved that there was a problem. But a solution wasn't, and isn't easy.
The macron was intended for writing overbars on long vowels, but this practice isn't really widely used, and the macron and the tilde are similar enough, and so for some time, people just didn't look too closely, and now I think most if not all fonts are using a tilde. So that part of the problem is solved.
But the Yen sign is much, much harder. Financial documents are very important. They can't contain a backslash. So the IT industry, with all their backslashes used for escaping and such, usually goes second place and lets the financial industry dominate. Every person in Japan who has dealt with scripts or programs on computers knows how to read a Yen sign as a backslash, or a backslash as a Yen sign (they might think that the Yen sign is the 'real thing'). Some Japanese programming books (not all), in particular those for beginners, and those centered on Windows, also print backslashes as Yen signs.
The solution would need two steps: 1) Change all the backslashes that are intended as Yen signs to the 'real' Unicode Yen sign (U+00a5) or its full-width version (U+ffe5). 2) Change the fonts to show the real backslash. Unfortunately, step 2) is a precondition of step 1), because it's otherwise not possible to distinguish U+005C and the 'real' Yen signs. So we are in a deadlock.
About 10 years ago, I came up with a 'solution', which I presented as part of a talk at the Internationalization and Unicode Conference, with some people from Microsoft in attendance. The proposal was to start tweaking the Yen sign glyph at U+005C in the relevant fonts to slowly but steadily lose the upper right arm and the crossbars and at the same time tilt the lower half stem so that after a few iterations, we would end up at a backslash. The idea was to unobtrusively let it show when a backslash was (mis)used for a Yen sign, but still at least at the start have everyday people read the sign as a Yen sign with their financial stuff. Alas, even this solution didn't get implemented :-).
Overall, the problem is somewhat similar to the Y2K problem: A lot of software and data needs to be changed to solve the problem. The main difference is that there's no deadline. That means nobody is in a rush :-(.

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Received on Monday, 13 December 2021 04:57:47 UTC