chekovsphaser reblogged
Websites referring to letters on alphabets and languages other than English (ç, ì, ü, etc.) as "special characters" and stopping us from using it on our names is cultural colonialism I think
#i agree and disagree with this#for a couple of reasons#and for the record i am speaking as someone who does have a 'special character' in their name#up to a certain level of diacritics it is possible and fairly easy to program#for unicode or whatever the database#but once you get outside of the latin+ alphabet it becomes a lot more complicated#and I wouldnt say its colonialist in any way to use a format that you can read (generally)#i mean there are exceptions like when the name really truly does not matter#but in official documentation govt websites etc its important to be legible by whoever is reading it#THAT BEING SAID I have encountered databases that didn't recognise names under 2 characters#which is so absurd when you think of the sheer number of people with 2 character surnames#(extremely common in tranlisterated chinese names for instance)#But ALSO like a website based in a particular country in a particular language is going to cater to that language#in brazil I have never encountered a local-based website which didn't allow brazilian portuguese standard diacritics#Not everything is made for every single person in the world and that is not necessarily colonialism