Greeings,
I thought this would be of interest to people here who might be
involved in multilingual news services:
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The Ethiopian News Headlines has relocated to a new server at
http://www.ethiozena.net/ and is making it easier than ever to
read news headlines in Unicode. A companion Unicode only server
is launched at http://unicode.ethiozena.net/ which serves
articles in UTF-8 encoding only.
Other new features include localization in three languages and daily
article links are packaged in XML for other news services to link to
(see http://www.ethiozena.net/zena.xml and a demonstration parsing
script in Perl http://www.ethiozena.net/zena.pl.txt).
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As someone involved in the service I often wish there was some
form of "compressed" Unicode encoding. The 3-byte penalty that
Ethiopic bears under UTF-8 turns into higher bandwidth that web
hosting services meter and charge for by the megabyte. For a
popular site this soon makes UTF-8 a costly option to support.
A system analagous to iso-8859-x whereby Ethiopic and other scripts
in the 3 byte range could be shifted back into the 2 byte range
might help (generally only English and Ethiopic is desired together).
Fortunately there is mod_gzip for Apache. I would appreciate any
information about other options.
thanks,
/Daniel
