I’m not sure how the discussion of “which is better” relates to the discussion of ill-formed UTF-8 at all.
And to the last, saying “you cannot process UTF-16 without handling surrogates” seems to me to be the equivalent of saying “you cannot process UTF-8 without handling lead & trail bytes”. That’s how the respective encodings work. One could look at it and think “there are 128 unicode characters that have the same value in UTF-8 as UTF-32,” and “there are xx thousand unicode characters that have the same value in UTF-16 and UTF-32.” -Shawn From: Unicode [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of David Starner via Unicode Sent: Monday, May 15, 2017 2:38 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Feedback on the proposal to change U+FFFD generation when decoding ill-formed UTF-8 On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 8:41 AM Alastair Houghton via Unicode <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 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.
