Displaying Character Variants

Of course we cannot magically explain characters that even sinologists have trouble with. My point is simply that displaying character variants on the web is easier nowadays, especially when one uses XML. If you look at the wiki page anzeige-modi, you can see the example

<s xml:lang="zh">中国
<reg norm="歷" type="simple">歴</reg>
<reg norm ="中国" type="simple">中<image xlink:href="symbols/chinese/⿴口玉.svg"/></reg>。</s>

and three ways of displaying it. The user can switch between the original gestalt and a normalized version. (Of course ⿴口玉 is not a "real" example. See the notes especially for Chinese on the same page.)

Also of interest:

• The workflow for character variants here
• Examples of characters proposed for inclusion in Unicode: ​here
• issues of regularizing text here