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No he doesn't, he dismisses it out of hand by choosing an example that is uniquely suited to minimize the advantages of UTF-16 for non-Roman scripts. Precious l
by maaku 15y ago
No he doesn't, he dismisses it out of hand by choosing an example that is uniquely suited to minimize the advantages of UTF-16 for non-Roman scripts. Precious little of an HTML document is actually textual content.
- ori_b 15y agoI think that's the point; In the real world, any significant chunk of non-roman text is embedded in far more roman text, or in terms of internals of programs, is generally dwarfed by the size of other data structures. More or less, I'd say that storage size of text usually doesn't matter.
- paulsutter 15y agoPrecious little of the data stored in the world is textual content. It's hard to believe that choice of encoding standards materially impacts RAM or disk budgets. Most of his points are not related to encoding size but to simplicity and standardization. I find those reasons to be very compelling. I'm asking for clear counterarguments because I concede that my ASCII background could predispose me to UTF-8. Please be a little clearer, I really do want to know.
- pjscott 15y agoHTML documents are hardly unusual examples. Also, look at the other column in that table, where he stripped out the HTML tags and looked only at the body text: UTF-16 was somewhat smaller, and gzipping them made the difference negligible. Does UTF-16 really have such a great advantage for non-Roman writing systems? Or is this motivated more by a disliking for Anglocentrism?