From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Fri Mar 04 2005 - 14:15:45 CST
At 09:27 AM 3/4/2005, Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai wrote:
>Given these points, wouldn't an ever-expanding standard like Unicode be a
>cause to data bloat at one point? Since you will need continuous larger
>encoding space to encode certain specific characters?
To paraphrase Ken Whistler's standard answer:
Nothing gets added to the Standard without approval from the technical
committees that do the maintenance. At the current rate of about 1,000
characters per year, it would take 800 years to fill up the space
A rate of 1,000 characters per year is plenty enough to deal with
possible future innovations such as the occasional writing reform.
>Not to mention that the supporting fonts will get bigger and bigger.
The only font collection that will have to track the growth of the standard
will be the one used to print the documentation. As more characters get
added that aren't widely used, better mechanism may be invented to allow
users to get just the fonts they need.
That's a problem that requires its own engineering and possibly standardization
approach, but it is independent of character encoding as such.
>Although I have no idea how much of a problem it is given storage prices
>nowadays.
The actual *rate* of growth of the Unicode Standard is about 1%, with the
rate diminishing, so there is no compounding, like in growth rates or
interest rates. There are few large unencoded scripts or symbol sets left,
so the rate is likely to slow down before settling on a very small level to
track writing reforms, new currency symbols and other ongoing maintenance.
Therefore, whatever problem there is with the size of the standard, it's
not going to dramatically change in the near future.
A./
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