• To: <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: But is it fair? - An exploration of alphabets and ideograms
• From: "William J. Kammerer" <wkammerer@n...>
• Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 08:22:41 -0500
• Organization: Novannet, LLC. Columbus, US-OH
• References: <E1D7CK0-0006nP-00@u...>

But then is it "fair" that English requires a whopping 19 bytes to
transmit "microencephalopathy," or even 13 bytes for the Germanic
"pinheadedness," when there's probably an efficient ideogram or two
(requiring only 6 to 8 bytes total) for the same concept in Chinese?

William J. Kammerer

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Kay" <mike@s...>
To: "'William J. Kammerer'" <wkammerer@n...>;
<xml-dev@l...>
Sent: Friday, 04 March, 2005 07:54 AM
Subject: RE:  [About Unicode] Why the symbol LOGICAL NOT is
missing from the UCS ?


> I can't comment on the usability of any alphabet other than Latin, but
> is it "fair" that Chinese ideograms chew up tens of thousands of code
> points in Unicode?

It's balanced by the unfairness that Latin letters only occupy one byte
in UTF-8, whereas Chinese ideograms occupy three or four.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/

• Follow-Ups:
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    • From: "Joe Fawcett" <joefawcett@h...>

• References:
  • RE: [About Unicode] Why the symbol LOGICAL NOT is missing from the UCS ?
    • From: "Michael Kay" <mike@s...>

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