Aman Chawla wrote,
> Taking the extra links into account the sizes are:
> English: 10.4 Kb
> Devanagari: 15.0 Kb
> Thus the Dev. page is 1.44 times the Eng. page. For sites providing archives
> of documents/manuscripts (in plain text) in Devanagari, this factor could be
> as high as approx. 3 using UTF-8 and around 1 using ISCII.
>
This is true, but please recall Asmus Freytag's comment about
file compression in this regard. Usually, when someone offers
a large body of plain text in any script, files are compressed
in one way or another in order to speed up downloads.
It would be an interesting study to compare the compressed sizes
of a large body of work translated into various languages/scripts,
and perhaps a list member has already made such a study.
The two files you'd attached fit quite nicely into ZIP format,
the zipped English file is 3149 bytes while the zipped Hindi
file is 3929 bytes.
25% may not be 300%, but it isn't insignificant. As you note, if the
mark-up were removed from both of those files, the percentage of
increase would be slightly higher. But, as connection speeds continue
to improve, these differences are becoming almost minuscule.
Best regards,
James Kass.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Sun Jan 20 2002 - 23:15:53 EST