Re: UTF-8 versus UTF-16 bandwidth

From: Juliusz Chroboczek (jec@dcs.ed.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Aug 19 1999 - 17:43:30 EDT


>> I think the main problem with having UTF-8 but not UTF-16 (or vice versa)
>> is that one requires greater bandwidth than the other for different classes
>> of writing systems.

Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>:

MK> Fully negligible.

(Explanation snipped.)

MK> So the UTF-8 bandwidth overhead is really more of an academic
MK> problem (or worse, a political pretext).

Don't underestimate political and emotional motivations. ``This
Unicode thing is just a European fad, it's really only good for Latin
characters. Let's stick to our lovely locale-specific coded character
sets.'' (Rings a bell, Markus?)

In other words, whatever the advantages of UTF-8, handling, or at
least taking into account, UTF-16 is necessary if you want Unicode to
be adopted by users and implementors in East-Asian countries.

                                        J.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:51 EDT