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> which oddly don't count bytes, they count code points Not so odd, but very sensible! I'm always saddened by this oversight in SMS messages — they're 160 7bit
by adimitrov 11y ago
> which oddly don't count bytes, they count code points
Not so odd, but very sensible! I'm always saddened by this oversight in SMS messages — they're 160 7bit characters, so 140 octets. But those 7bit characters are the GSM charset. If you want to write in other languages than Western European ones, your message will be encoded using UTF-16 — now you only have 70 characters. It might be OK for Chinese, but it's absolutely unusable for Cyrillic.
Of course, the limiting factor in SMS is architectural, whereas in Twitter, it's philosophical, so there's your difference.
- Dylan16807 11y agoThere's only so many ways you can slice a kilobyte. Measuring bits is just the way to do it for data transmissions. Support for compact representation of more languages would have been nice. Something like an 8 bit mode with 2 byte escapes for setting code page and 3 byte escapes for arbitrary unicode characters. As a bonus you'd actually be able to fit more emoji in that mode, 46 vs. 35.