{"id":22219,"date":"2018-07-20T15:28:39","date_gmt":"2018-07-20T19:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=22219"},"modified":"2018-07-31T16:07:44","modified_gmt":"2018-07-31T20:07:44","slug":"unicode-waiting-for-new-japanese-era-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/20\/unicode-waiting-for-new-japanese-era-name\/","title":{"rendered":"Unicode Waiting for New Japanese Era Name"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Japanese_era_name\">Wikipedia<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Japanese_era_name\"><p>The current period is known as &ldquo;Heisei&rdquo; (&#x5E73;&#x6210;). It started on 8 January 1989, the day after the death of the Emperor Hirohito. His son, the 125th Emperor Akihito, acceded to the throne. It is scheduled to end on 30 April 2019, his planned date of Abdication.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.unicode.org\/L2\/L2018\/18220-u121planning.txt\">Ken Whistler<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/www.unicode.org\/L2\/L2018\/18220-u121planning.txt\">\n<p>The date of that [Unicode 12.1] release, which cannot really be moved, given the complex\ndependencies now in place for the corresponding CLDR and ICU releases,\nand for the vendor product cycles that depend, in turn, on those, poses\na problem for the anticipated announcement of the new Japanese era name.\nThe date of the abdication and start of the subsequent Japanese reign\nera is now fixed, but the actual name of the era will not be announced,\napparently, until sometime shortly after February 24, 2019. That timeframe\nis way too short to adjust the data files and charts for the addition\nof a new character, no matter how urgent it is for implementation.<\/p>\n<p>The problem, in this case, is that even though we know the code point\nfor this new character, U+32FF, which the UTC set aside back in January,\nwe cannot know the actual content of that code point until the era\nname itself is announced. The characters encoded for these calendrical\nsymbols in Unicode have compatibility decompositions, and those decompositions\ndepend on the actual name chosen for the era. Because the decomposition,\nonce assigned, is immutable, involving Unicode normalization, the UTC\ncannot afford to make any mistakes here, nor can it just <em>guess<\/em> and\nrelease the code point early.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p>Via <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/davedelong\/status\/1020115174785601536\">Dave DeLong<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/davedelong\/status\/1020115174785601536\">\n<p>Stuff like this makes me wonder if we&rsquo;ll ever see the CLDR (the database that defines date formats, calendar semantics, localization stuff, etc) decoupled from the Unicode libraries proper, in the same way that the timezone database is distributable separately<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wikipedia: The current period is known as &ldquo;Heisei&rdquo; (&#x5E73;&#x6210;). It started on 8 January 1989, the day after the death of the Emperor Hirohito. His son, the 125th Emperor Akihito, acceded to the throne. It is scheduled to end on 30 April 2019, his planned date of Abdication. Ken Whistler: The date of that [Unicode [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2018-07-31T20:07:46Z","apple_news_api_id":"73689412-39fe-4ce0-bc54-1d55dfb840d0","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2018-07-31T20:07:49Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQ==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/Ac2iUEjn-TOC8VB1V37hA0A","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[1714,364,258],"class_list":["post-22219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-japan","tag-time","tag-unicode"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22219"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22221,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22219\/revisions\/22221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}