👷 🚧 Infrastructure Overhaul! Report newly broken functionality here! 🔥 🚒

[mic]

Works. Thanks.

But using it, I now found another bug. If I click on a collapsed series I can see the read members, that works, but they are shown with white background which disrupts dark mode.

[brandon]

Ah yeah, that’s a known style issue, thanks for the reminder!

[Naphthalene]

Just in case, forwarding here:

Would support for more letters be possible?

This newly broke for me again on desktop, so I can show screenshots of what I mean. Broken default serving Chinese variants: [image] Forced Japanese variants by adding lang=“ja-jp” to the div: [image]

[brandon]

@gillianfaith

This newly broke for me again on desktop, so I can show screenshots of what I mean.

Broken default serving Chinese variants:

Forced Japanese variants by adding lang=“ja-jp” to the div:

@Naphthalene

Oh, okay, it is a Han unification problem for you.
The original comment was about the forum, not the main website.
I think you should post that in the Infrastructure Overhaul! Report newly broken functionality here! thread.

Also pinging @mic. What is the proposed solution here? Wrapping the main site in lang=“ja-jp” attribute?

[Naphthalene]

@brandon

Also pinging @mic.

@mic was talking about the forum, not the main site. (And furthermore about Japanese kanji variants, not Chinese hanzi).

@brandon

Wrapping the main site in lang=“ja-jp” attribute?

Only the Japanese part of the website (when Japanese is selected). My understanding is that Korean hanja are slightly different in appearance as well.

Here’s a random example from the Internet:

[mic]

Though I started with the forum, at the end I was talking about both sites.

[gillianfaith]

@brandon

What is the proposed solution here? Wrapping the main site in lang=“ja-jp” attribute?

I don’t know enough about web dev or Han unification to know any other solutions, but I assume there are more elegant ways of handling multiple languages on a single page than with an HTML tag predating Web2.0

If you use the attribute, it shouldn’t be on the whole site level, because the whole site is English, and from what I understand the top-level lang attribute determines your rank in search engines (e.g. an English site will be prioritized on a google.com search and disprioritized on a google.jp search). It would only be needed on divs that would be expected to contain Japanese text (like book titles and blurbs), meaning it’s not a good solution for the forum, because any Japanese text that shows up will be incidental.

[seanblue]

I agree that a global lang tag is not the right solution. I may be missing something, but I don’t really see what there is to “fix” at all. If you want to see Japanese fonts by default as opposed to Chinese, install Japanese as a language in your OS (browser setting may work too, not sure). A Chinese font is the default because it’s the more common language, but it does render in a Japanese font if you install Japanese.

[pm215]

@seanblue

I may be missing something, but I don’t really see what there is to “fix” at all. If you want to see Japanese fonts by default as opposed to Chinese, install Japanese as a language in your OS (browser setting may work too, not sure).

Han unification is a mess IMHO, but the thing to fix is that where a website knows that text is Japanese it should tell the browser so that it can use a Japanese font, and vice versa for Chinese. If, say, I’m learning both Japanese and Chinese, or I’m a Japanese speaker learning Chinese, then I probably do have a preference for the default but I also want to see Chinese text with the right Chinese font and Japanese text with the right Japanese font. Setting the default at the user end is a great idea for anybody who (like I guess most of us) is almost only ever interacting with Japanese text and not Chinese because it sidesteps a whole load of cases where websites don’t (or can’t, as for instance with text in user posts on forums) indicate which language it’s in, but that doesn’t mean websites shouldn’t try to indicate the language where they can. Plus it means the website looks right even to users who haven’t read up about this han unification problem and been told they need to install Japanese language support or adjust which language is preferred over the other.

[seanblue]

That makes sense, but I think where it can be applied is limited. It probably shouldn’t be applied on the forums at all since the forums are primarily in English and there’s no Japanese/Chinese specific sections. (And users can define the language of their text themselves if it’s important enough.) For the main website, maybe it could be applied to titles and summary blurbs? I imagine that’s about it though. Again, anything user-defined wouldn’t make sense, though Brandon could whitelist span tags and the lang attribute for use in reviews if he really wants.

[gillianfaith]

@seanblue

I don’t really see what there is to “fix” at all.

A website with Japanese content should be serving users with the Japanese character variants by default, because Japanese is the language being used and not Chinese. In my case, I’m pretty sure what broke and suddenly changed the font was a Firefox update and not Natively, and it was indeed easily fixed by resetting my preferred languages in Firefox, but browser and OS language settings are only meant to be fallbacks in case a website is available for multiple locales. For a site where the content will always be in a specific language, that’s information that the site itself should provide so the browser doesn’t have to guess. Any user, from anywhere in the world with any primary language, should be able to visit learnnatively.com and see the titles of Japanese books written in a Japanese font, because those book titles are in Japanese and none of Natively’s content is in Chinese.

Unfortunately I might have been wrong about there being a more modern and elegant solution than bloating the HTML with a million lang attributes for every piece of Japanese text on the page. I tried looking it up, and every answer just said to control it with lang, and I even found this essay proposing best practices for mixed English-Japanese sites saying the same. So in the case of forums and usernames and such where the language used will be unpredictable or majority non-Japanese, there’s no good solution besides depending on the user to have the right OS/browser settings.

[brandon]

This is all very interesting and I never realized this was an issue! Granted, as I look at it more, the characters are at least all legible… they don’t seem different enough to really cause problems, but definitely annoying, eek.

@gillianfaith

Any user, from anywhere in the world with any primary language, should be able to visit learnnatively.com and see the titles of Japanese books written in a Japanese font, because those book titles are in Japanese and none of Natively’s content is in Chinese.

Totally agree with you and all the others saying this. I think titles, authors & blurbs are an easy fix and honestly more proper html. Tags also could potentially be included if they include Japanese characters, but there is a potential (far future) problem case of cross mixing Japanese/Chinese tags.

With regards to parsing reviews and/or allowing the user to specify spans & lang attributes, potentially.

As for the forum, yeah there’s not a good way. Potentially a discourse plugin that a developer could build? Allow you to specify Japanese or Chinese based on a category tag?

But yes, for the time being, I think just titles/authors/blurbs make sense!