On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 12:57:08AM -0500, David Starner wrote: > On 9/5/06, Rich Felker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >In all seriousness, though, unless you're dealing with image, music, > >or movie files, text weighs in quite heavy in size. > > As opposed to what? The vast majority of content is one of the four, > and what's left--say, Flash files--don't seem particularly small > compared to text.
I wasn't thinking of a website but rather a complete computer system. I have several gigabytes of email which is larger than even a very bloated OS and several hundred thousand times bigger than a non-bloated OS. Multiply this by a factor of 3 or more and it could quite easily go from "feasible to store" to "infeasible to store". > >If you're making a website > >without fluff and with lots of information, text size will be the > >dominant factor in traffic. It's quite unfortunate that native > >language text is 3 to 6(*) times larger in countries where bandwidth > >is very expensive. > > Welcome to HTTP 1.1. There's no reason not to compress the data while > you're sending it across the network, which will fix the vast majority > of this problem. Here you have the issue of compression performance versus bandwidth, especially relevant on a heavily loaded server (of course you can precompress static texts). Also gzip doesn't perform so well on UTF-8 so bzip2 would be better but also much more cpu-hungry and I doubt any clients support it. Anyway all of this discussion is in a sense pointless since none of us have the power to change any of the problem and since there's no real solution even if we could. But sometimes you just have to bitch about the stuff the Unicode folks messed up on.. Rich -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
