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

Sorry that it took a long time to respond. I am from the Japanese Language Enablement task force that @r12a mentioned (but I am not speaking for the group) and a former Apple engineer in the OS internationalization group.

As you know, this is a legacy issue. It would not get any better without breaking something at least once. Here’s what I think:

### Fonts
I would remove all tricks for fonts. If a web page is in Unicode and uses U+005C, it is a reverse solidus, period. Removing the tricks would break the look of some Windows-centric web pages in a way many people can recognize what’s happening. I would expect some complaints from users, but it is a bug in the web page, and the behaviour is consistent with other browsers on the platform.

### Encoding
Theoretically, 0x5C in Shift-JIS is a yen sign and converting it to Unicode should give you U+00A5. As @litherum mentioned, 0x5C has a semantic meaning in some contexts, regardless of the encoding. Unfortunately, if the text is in Shift-JIS, it is the yen sign that carries the semantic meaning. I believe this is why encoding converters often (always?) convert 0x5C in Shift-JIS to U+005C in Unicode, while theoretically, it should be U+00A5. Breaking the look is better than breaking the function.

If WebKit has patches to change U+005C to U+00A5 (or is it just changing the look of U+005C as if it were U+00A5 without changing the backing store?  in either case), it is effectively fixing the issue with the encoding converter. Showing a yen sign for Shift-JIS 0x5C is correct behaviour. If my understanding is accurate, there would be no reason to revert it back. For the longer term when we have a smaller number of JIS-based pages, I hope we can fix the encoding converters. It is a harder and riskier change, but it makes things simpler.

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Received on Thursday, 25 August 2022 05:36:10 UTC