Naena Guru, Tue, 8 Jan 2013 15:56:52 -0600: > The statement, > > the death of most character sets makes everyone's systems smaller and > faster > > is *FALSE*. Compare the sizes of the following two files that are copies of > a newspaper article. The top part in red has few more words in romanized > Singhala in the romanized Singhala file. Notice the size of each file: > 1. http://ahangama.com/jc/uniSinDemo.htm size:38,092 bytes > 2. http://ahangama.com/jc/RSDemo.htm size:18,922 bytes [ … ] > Again *demonstrably WRONG*
To double check your statement, I saved the above tow pages in Safari’s webarchive format[1] and compared the resulting size of each archive file. The benefit of doing such a comparison is that we then get to count both the HTML page *plus* all the extra fonts that is included in the "romanized Singhala file". Thus, we get a more *real* basis for comparing the relative size of the two pages. Here are the results: 1. http://ahangama.com/jc/uniSinDemo.htm, webarchive size: 205 459 bytes 2. http://ahangama.com/jc/RSDemo.htm, webarchive size: 223 201 bytes As you can see, the "romanized Singhala file" looses - it becomes bigger than the UTF-8 version. I suppose the reason for this is that for the "romanized Singhala file", then the folder has to download fonts in order to display the "romanized Singhala". (It tried to do the same in Firefox, using its ability to save the "complete" page, however it did for some reason not work). I also ran a test on both pages with the YSlow service.[2] Here are the total weight of each page, according to YSlow, when run from Firefox: 1. http://ahangama.com/jc/uniSinDemo.htm, YSlow size: 92.7K 2. http://ahangama.com/jc/RSDemo.htm, YSlow size: 65.7K And here are the YSlow results from Safari: 1. http://ahangama.com/jc/uniSinDemo.htm, YSlow size: 11.2K 2. http://ahangama.com/jc/RSDemo.htm, YSlow size: 9.0K Rather interesting that Safari and Firefox differs that much. But anyhow, the YSlow results are pretty clear, and demonstrates that while the "romanized Singhala" page is smaller, it is only between 20 and 30 percent smaller than the Unicode page. However, despite the slightly bigger size, YSlow in Firefox (don't know how to see it in Safari) *still* reported that the Unicode page loaded faster! Further more, when I inspected the source code of these to documents, then I discovered that for the the Unicode file, you included *two* downloadable fonts, whereas for the "romanized Singhala" page, you only included *one* downloadable font. (Why? Because both files actually contains some "romanized Singhala"!). Before we can *really* take those two test pages seriously, you must make sure that both pages use the same amount of fonts! As it is, then i strongly suspect that if you had included the same amount of downloadable fonts in both pages, then the Unicode page would have won. Of course, the "romanized Singhala" page has many usability problems as well: 1) It doesn't work with screen readers (users will hear the text as latin text), 2) it doesn’t work with Find-in-page search (users will type in Sinhala, but since the content is actually Latin, they won’t find anything on the page), 3) the title of the "romanized Singhala" page is (I believe) not actually readable as Singhala, 4) there are many browsers in which the "romanized Singhala" file will not display: text browsers, Opera and any browser where CSS is disabled. 5) You get all kinds of problems for form submission. Conclusion: Your claims about the file size advantage of "romanized Singhala" seems grossly exaggerated, if at all true, based as they are on a test of two files which aren actually equal when it comes to the extra CSS stuff that they embed. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webarchive [2] http://yslow.org/ -- leif halvard silli
