Re: Asian Problems with Unicode

[Robert Coie <rac@mata.intrigue.com>]

David Starner <dvdeug@x8b4e53cd.dhcp.okstate.edu> writes:

> First place, are these standards mutually exclusive? Is it a problem in
> practice to work with both?

They are encoding methods, so are mutually exclusive in the same sense
that base64 and uuencode are.  In practice, one major benefit for
using Unicode to work with Japanese is that information about which
encoding system is being used no longer needs to be stored separately
from data.  This benefit is lost if you don't know whether you are
seeing UCS-2 or UTF-8.

> Second, this isn't a big deal. I don't believe most people have huge 
> amounts of uncompressed text laying about, at least not enough to 
> make a doubling of the space make a real difference. As for compressed
> text, almost any compressor should get the text down to about the
> same space usage. (Feel free to prove me wrong here with real numbers.)

No, it's not a big deal, more just an inconvenience.  About the only
time it really caused me problems was when working with Java-SQL
connectivity.  There are UTF-8 extraction primitives, but no support
for working with UCS-2.  I had to either explain to the client why the
database was going to have 50% bloat, or roll unsupported access
primitives.

-- 
Robert Coie
Implementor, Apropos Ltd.