From: jcowan@reutershealth.com
Date: Thu Jan 22 2004 - 13:50:47 EST
Markus Scherer scripsit:
> UTF-8 is useful because it's simple, and supported just about everywhere -
> but it's otherwise hardly optimal for anything.
You entirely omit its principal advantage, sine qua non: it's maximally
ASCII-compatible, using bytes 0x00 to 0x7F to represent ASCII characters and
nothing else.
Mark Crispin's UTF-9 (not to be confused with Jerome Abela's) is also
excellent, although most of us don't have 36-bit systems, for which it
makes sense. A precis:
Code points (base 2) UTF-9 code units (base 2)
0000000000000abcdefgh 0abcdefgh
00000abcdefghijklmnop 1abcdefgh 0ijklmnop
abcdefghijklmnopqrstu 1000abcde 1fghijklm 0nopqrstu
This is almost as good as Latin-1 for its repertoire, only minutely worse
than UTF-16 for the rest of the BMP, and beats all other encodings for the
other planes.
-- John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com> http://www.ccil.org/~cowan http://www.reutershealth.com Charles li reis, nostre emperesdre magnes, Set anz totz pleinz ad ested in Espagnes.
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