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Re: default character encoding for everything in debian



On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 09:42:18PM +0100, Roger Leigh wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 09:49:34PM +0200, Norbert Preining wrote:
> > I didn't call utf-8 itself rubbish, I am myself a strong proponent for
> > utf-8, only your quote that it is "about as compact as an extended encoding
> > is going to get".
> 
> I should have qualified it with "that is both 8-bit and backward-
> compatible with ASCII".  Other encodings will be more compact, but
> AFAIK there isn't a more compact UCS encoding, though UTF-16 /might/
> be more compact for certain languages, albeit without any 8-bit
> backward compatibility.

Actually, SCSU and BOCU-1 are potentially more compact, assuming the
text can be compressed.  However, they are not backward-compatible with
ASCII; SCSU comes closer than BOCU-1.  As a practical matter, nobody of
any importance actually uses SCSU or BOCU-1, except for Reuters (with
SCSU).

-- 
brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US
+1 713 440 7475 | http://crustytoothpaste.ath.cx/~bmc | My opinion only
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