I tried to enter my name “哎满” and it didn’t work. I asked in libera chat and they said you can’t enter non-ascii chars in IRC, only few IRC instances supports it since it could be easily abused.
Erroneous Nickname: 哎满
I tried to enter my name “哎满” and it didn’t work. I asked in libera chat and they said you can’t enter non-ascii chars in IRC, only few IRC instances supports it since it could be easily abused.
Erroneous Nickname: 哎满
Some TLDs don’t allow full unicode either. Country TLDs usually just add their own special chars, for example .se (sweden) allows åäö.
The whole thing has a name as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack
I’d also add that ASCII has had some similar issues in the part, but that tends to have been ironed out by now via changes to onscreen typefaces.
For example, some old typewriters don’t have a “0” key or a “1” key because capital-o and lowercase-l looked similar enough and context was sufficient to let them be used in place of the corresponding number. This trained some people to do that, to the point that various software adapted to permit misuse of one in the place of the other. To this day, I can open up Firefox, and the following webpage will render green text:
Some other fixes were were made over time, like making capital-i, lowercase-l, and the pipe (“I”, “l”, and “|”) as more-visually-distinct characters in typefaces where this matters.
In the monospaced font world, “programming” or “coding” fonts, where not confusing the character in question is particularly important, place a premium on keeping characters like this particularly distinctive, even at the cost of trading off some aesthetic appeal or conforming to traditional typography or handwriting-like conventions for letters. You’ll get more-distinctive “.” and “,”, “O” and “0”, “l”, “I”, and “|”, “j” and “i”, etc.