Charles,
Wednesday, January 8, 2003, 3:12:47 PM, you wrote:
Charles> UTF-8 is space efficient if you still expect to have a large
proportion of
Charles> ASCII mixed in with it. It compares quite well with UTF-16 for European
Charles> languages, but I can imagine it would be less efficient in Chinese.
yes, it is good to mention the language that has more native speakers than
any other language on the planet.
But there is no theoretical or aesthetic superiority that can be claimed by
one over the other.
Charles> There are some practical superiorities. It transports well over many
Charles> Internet protocols, because it does not do nasty thungs with CR, LF and
Charles> NUL. It has the _whole_ of ASCII as a strict subset (which is not true
of
Charles> UTF-7).
Usually, the "plays well with other protocols" argument is given for use of
netAscii, which is a subset of 7-bit. I have not seen it used for 8-bit
before.
Charles> But UTF-8 would be a pain for internal use in Operating systems,
I thought we were talking about an exchange protocol, not o/s data storage.
The confusion on this issue probably stems from the fact that you can use
existing data viewers -- such as text editors -- to view the result of a
7-bit encoding and cannot use such "legacy" services for viewing UTF-8 or
UTF-16.
Charles> There are many editors that will display _something_ useful for any
8-bit
Charles> stuff.
The concern is not whether there is an existence proof for the capability,
or even whether there is already a strong support base. The concern is what
happens to the platforms that do not yet support it.
d/
--
Dave <mailto:dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com>
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