= Сообщение: 541 из 7127 ======================================= FTSC_PUBLIC = От : Michiel van der Vlist 2:280/5555 25 Nov 13 15:24:48 Кому : Alexey Vissarionov 25 Nov 13 15:24:48 Тема : UTF-8 FGHI : area://FTSC_PUBLIC?msgid=2:280/5555+52936513 На : area://FTSC_PUBLIC?msgid=2:5020/545+52933ee4 = Кодировка сообщения определена как: UTF-8 ================================== Ответ: area://FTSC_PUBLIC?msgid=2:203/2+52936eba ============================================================================== Hello Alexey,
On Monday November 25 2013 15:54, you wrote to me:
AV>>> It does, but in a very stupid way.
MV>> In what way is it "stupid"?
AV> 2 bytes per every character. For a 33-symbol alphabet (where 32 AV> symbols are actually used) that constitutes unacceptable 100% AV> redundance if compared to KOI8-R.
I knew you were going to say that. ;-)
Twenty or maybe even fifteen years ago, I would have said you had a point. But now, well over a decade in the 21st century, I am no longer impressed. Both the cost of storage and the cost of transport have gone down by several orders of magnitude. Try buying a hard disk _smaller_ than 40 GB. Try filling it with text only. Look at what your HDs and USB sticks are actually filled with. Most likely only a very small part is just text. The rest are pictures, videos, sound tracks and what else. An increase of the text part by just a factor 2 is totally irrelevant these days.
AV> That's why I avoid UTF-8 where possible.
AV>>>>> in Russian normally use KOI8-R (defined in the GOST 19768-74 AV>>>>> standard, see also RFC 1489), and Fidonet messages in R50 (and AV>>>>> around) normally use CP866.
In Fidonet we use compression when transporting. The factor two almost disappears with compression, because of the large redundancy.
AV>>> Given that, when we need to use English, we don't change AV>>> anything, but simply use the Latin part of those character sets. MV>> What when you need to write German?
AV> First, I'll need to learn it... :-)
And you have already learned Chinese?
AV> Second, it uses same Latin characters found in English and several AV> additional, therefore making almost no difference in the size of AV> German text written using CP850 or UTF-8.
True, but see above about relevancy. Having to install a dedicated character set for each and every language is a nuisance. I very much prefer one universal character set that covers all. And to hell with the factor 2 in text size. Microsoft saw the light when they moved to Unicode internally with Windows NT.
It is time the Fidonet community saw the light too...
