🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1gpruaINNhfm@frigate.doc.ic.ac.uk>, rap@news (Ross Paterson) writes:
> It's hard to imagine that FSS-UTF will be popular with users of those
> alphabets (all originating in Asia, BTW) whose letters are going to
> take up 3 bytes, while they take up 2 in UTF-1 and 7 bits or so in
> existing standards.


	i wish folks would just come out and say the character sets they mean.
if you mean kanji (shift-jis), or chinese (GB2312-80 or Big 5), or korean,
then the existing practice is two bytes per character.

	UTF-1 does #00-#9f in one byte, #a0-#4015 in two bytes, and #4106-#ffff
in three bytes. FSS-UTF does #00-#7f in one byte, #80-#7ff in two bytes and
#800-#ffff in three bytes. given the unified han characters now start at #4e00,
i'd say FSS-UTF and UTF-1 had pretty much the same performance here.

	certainly, the characters between #800 and #4015 will take 50% more
space in FSS-UTF than UTF-1. from our file command (which guesses at languages),
this would seem to include Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya,
Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Thai, Lao, Tibetan, Georgian,
Japanese (hiragana etc), chinese (some) and korean. (with the exceptions
of the CJK scripts and perhaps georgian, there is no measureable email
traffic in these scripts.)

 	and even for these scripts, i would guess connectivity (in the sense
of being able to send/receive messages at all) matters more to those folks
than the increase in space (how much of your disk is mail?) or decrease in
bandwidth (in most messages i see, headers are 30-50% of the message).

	in any case, i agree there is a space overhead. its up to users
to figure out if its worth it; i just wanted to clear up factual errors.


			andrew