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).
--------------------------------------------------------------------

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

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