On Wednesday, 1 June 2016 at 15:02:33 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
On Wednesday, 1 June 2016 at 13:57:27 UTC, Joakim wrote:
No, I explicitly said not the web in a subsequent post. The
ignorance here of what 2G speeds are like is mind-boggling.
It's not hard. I think a lot of us remember when a 14.4 modem
was cutting-edge. Codepages and incompatible encodings were
terrible then, too.
Never again.
Well, when you _like_ a ludicrous encoding like UTF-8, not
sure your opinion matters.
It _is_ kind of ludicrous, isn't it? But it really is the
least-bad option for the most text. Sorry, bub.
No. The common string-handling use case is code that is
unaware which script (not language, btw) your text is in.
Lol, this may be the dumbest argument put forth yet.
This just makes it feel like you're trolling. You're not just
trolling, right?
I don't think anyone here even understands what a good
encoding is and what it's for, which is why there's no point
in debating this.
And I don't think you realise how backwards you sound to people
who had to live through the character encoding hell of the
past. This has been an ongoing headache for the better part of
a century (it still comes up in old files, sites, and systems)
and you're literally the only person I've ever seen seriously
suggest we turn back now that the madness has been somewhat
tamed.
Indeed, Joakim's proposal is so insane it beggars belief (why not
go back to baudot encoding, it's only 5 bit, hurray, it's so much
faster when used with flag semaphores).
As a programmer in the European Commission translation unit,
working on the probably biggest translation memory in the world
for 14 years, I can attest that Unicode is a blessing. When I
remember the shit we had in our documents because of the code
pages before most programs could handle utf-8 or utf-16 (and
before 2004 we only had 2 alphabets to take care of, Western and
Greek). What Joakim does not understand, is that there are huge,
huge quantities of documents that are multi-lingual. Translators
of course handle nearly exclusively with at least bi-lingual
documents. Any document encountered by a translator must at least
be able to present the source and the target language. But even
outside of that specific population, multilingual documents are
very, very common.
If you have to deal with delivering the fastest possible i18n
at GSM data rates, well, that's a tough problem and it sounds
like you might need to do something pretty special. Turning the
entire ecosystem into your special case is not the answer.
