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

• From: Tony Graham <tgraham@m...>
• To: <xml-dev@i...>
• Date: Sat, 13 Nov 1999 14:11:25 -0400 (EST)

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
======================================================================
Tony Graham                            mailto:tgraham@m...
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
17 West Jefferson Street                    Direct Phone: 301/315-9632
Suite 207                                          Phone: 301/315-9631
Rockville, MD  20850                                 Fax: 301/315-8285
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• References:
  • RE: Feeler for SML (Simple Markup Language)
    • From: "Don Park" <donpark@d...>
  • Re: Feeler for SML (Simple Markup Language)
    • From: "Michael Champion" <Mike.Champion@s...>
  • Re: Feeler for SML (Simple Markup Language)
    • From: "Richard Anderson" <rja@a...>

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