On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 8:41 AM Alastair Houghton via Unicode < unicode@unicode.org> wrote:
> Yes, UTF-8 is more efficient for primarily ASCII text, but that is not the > case for other situations UTF-8 is clearly more efficient space-wise that includes more ASCII characters than characters between U+0800 and U+FFFF. Given the prevalence of spaces and ASCII punctuation, Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew and Arabic will pretty much always be smaller in UTF-8. Even for scripts that go from 2 bytes to 3, webpages can get much smaller in UTF-8 (http://www.gov.cn/ goes from 63k in UTF-8 to 116k in UTF-16, a factor of 1.8). The max change in reverse is 1.5, as two bytes goes to three. > and the fact is that handling surrogates (which is what proponents of > UTF-8 or UCS-4 usually focus on) is no more complicated than handling > combining characters, which you have to do anyway. > Not necessarily; you can legally process Unicode text without worrying about combining characters, whereas you cannot process UTF-16 without handling surrogates.