On Thursday, May 16, 2002, at 03:04 AM, Mark Lewellen wrote: > Hi all- > I have a question directed mostly at those involved in the Far East. > Since Unicode is often implemented in UTF8, and UTF8 uses 3 bytes > for Chinese characters (instead of the 2 bytes in Chinese and Japanese > GB, Big5, JIS), UTF8 documents solely in these languages will be 50% > larger. This appears to be a large stumbling block to universal > acceptance of UTF8. Is there much resistance to UTF8 in the > Far East, are there work-arounds to the problem, and are many > people even aware of the problem? > Mark
Size of data is not a big deal these days with data compression and faster network. So far as I see there are very few who dislike UTF-8 because of the size bloats. Most of objections and dislikes against Unicode is more of politics and culture. Whether you like it or not, the Unicodization is steady because it is already blessed by Windows and MacOS (X). And you have virtually no choice but to use Unicode when you program in Java. But the Unicodization of applications have only begun. UTF-8 mails and web pages are still rare mainly because of lack of tools (well, as a matter of fact many of these tools do support Unicode but simple don't make UTF-8 a default when it sends or saves data). And even if tools are there it may still take a long time before data get converted to UTF-8. Unless you need to save more than 3 languages legacy encodings do suffice and many may still choose to save new data in legacy encodings for legacy applications. To me it is okay whether you choose to save your data in whichever encoding so long as I can read. That's why I became a maintainer of Encode module, a standard part of Perl 5.8 that enables you to do so. Dan the Encode Maintainer
