4 ms·
Not only kanji, but also hiragana and katakana (syllabic alphabets) encode to three bytes per character. Shift-JIS can encode all three to two bytes, as well as
by byuu 15y ago
Not only kanji, but also hiragana and katakana (syllabic alphabets) encode to three bytes per character. Shift-JIS can encode all three to two bytes, as well as half-width katakana to one byte per character.
However, if size is such a concern (eg for web transmission), text compression neutralizes the perceived benefit of region-specific encodings.
Shift-JIS' continued popularity has much more to do with change aversion than it does technical merit.
- khuey 15y agoOn the web ASCII (think HTML tags, CSS stylesheets, etc) typically is a large fraction of CJK pages, so the relative inefficiency of UTF-8 for encoding is less important.
- jeffdavis 15y agoAs I said above, I spoke with several Japanese people who said that some valid characters are not representable in Unicode. Some details can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification
- scoith 15y ago@ruediger There's nothing wrong with Unicode. UTF-8 sucks because it ends up taking more space. @byuu No it doesn't. Try compressing a SJIS text using gzip. Then convert it to UTF-8 and do the same thing. With a "perfect" compressor, there shouldn't be any difference since the information contents are the same, but unfortunately we don't have a perfect compression algorithm that hits the theoretical lower bound for compression.