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by TheDong 1201 days ago
This isn't about multiple encodings, this is about the one encoding, UTF-8, being able to represent multiple languages. Which is mostly can, except for han characters.

In my reply here, I can type in english and russian at once. Привет, мир.

Yet, if I try to type chinese on one line, and japanese on the next, I cannot do it. Hacker news does not let me enter "lang" tags, so I can only type either the chinese or the japanese variant of a kanji.

1 comments

Parent post says

> spans with their own encoding.

so yes it is about pages with multiple encodings. A span's smaller than a page!

The Unicode answer is "variation selectors" which are used for some historical variant kanji, but not for whole language switching. I suppose they could be used for that too though.