xml-dev - UTF-8 or ? for SML (was: Re: Feeler for SML (Simple Markup Language))

[Tony Graham <tgraham@mulberrytech.com>]

At 13 Nov 1999 15:46 -0000, Richard Anderson wrote:
 > But UTF-8 can support "foreign" characters so I dont see the argument for
 > having UTF-16 too.  Also, generally speaking UTF-8 encoding results in
 > smaller output for most cases.

Different people have different ideas of what constitutes "foreign".

For the majority of the characters in the Unicode Standard, UTF-8 uses
three bytes per character.  However, for the US-ASCII characters, it
uses only one byte per character.

For all characters in the Unicode Standard, UTF-16 uses two bytes per
character.

Whether a given file is less bytes as UTF-8 or UTF-16 is largely a
function of the proportion of unaccented Latin characters in the file.

Moreover, most legacy encodings for a single script use one byte per
character, although Chinese, Japanese, and Korean encodings use two or
more bytes per character.  UTF-8, therefore, isn't as efficient as the
legacy encodings of most scripts.  (Its advantage is that it can
represent more scripts than any legacy encoding.)

Regards,


Tony Graham
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Tony Graham                            mailto:tgraham@mulberrytech.com
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