>
So - your answer is essentially - "let them eat cake"?
> I do not agree that there is a UTF-8 tax.
The FACT - as has been established, is that with default mod_gzip
compression, UTF-8 can add 7% or so to the size of the download of
the text component of a website, compared to sjis or eucjp. The
precise amount will vary, depending on the amount of markup (which
will be 1byte in most cases).
> I think that
> there there is a higher cost for users that do not upgrade
> to newer technology. Someone driving a 25 year old pick up
> truck pays more for fuel than someone driving a new one.
Hold on - in your analogy, the old pickup runs LESS economically.
In THIS case, the NEW pickup - UTF-8 - runs less economically than
the old pickup - EUCJP/sjis. This is the case whether one uses adsl
or modem.
> That is not a tax, it is a higher cost that the drive
> chooses to pay rather than upgrade.
Most parts of Japan have adsl - but not all. So for some users there
IS no choice.
Even users with adsl at home will often access the net from a laptop
using their keitai-as-modem.
They will "pay" the UTF-8 tax.
"Flat rate connections" I hear you cry! But in fact, the move to
flat rate internet connections mean that the "pain" of the UTF-8 tax
is paid disproportionately by people who use the net only rarely.
(That is the economics of flat rate connections - it is the
occasional users who subsidize the gluttons). It does not "remove"
it. Just spreads it around. Of course adsl reduces the cost of
bandwidth, making that 7% 7% of a lower cost commodity.
In fact, the "tax" still has to be "paid", flat rate or not, adsl or
not.
NOTE: Unicode is a worldwide standard. We here in Japan, in our
"bandwidth is cheap" environment can afford to be blase about
bloating the text components of our websites by 7% or so.
But if you are in that part of the world population (a large part
of it - swathes of rural China, rural India, for example), who do NOT
have "access" to fast, all you can eat, adsl then this "let them eat
cake" style of answer really won't do.
To all those unicode advocates out there who may want to jump in with
- "but unicode brings lots of advantages that reduce costs in other
areas - support etc " - I would not deny that that is true, in some
cases, for some applications. In such cases it is clearly the way to
go - the "UTF-8 tax" on bandwidth consumption is OFTEN worth paying I
would guess. Though not always - keitai pages from gateway to handset
being a case in point.
But the fact that it bloats webpages by 7% or so with mod_gzip
encoding - which is pretty standard - is something it seems to me it
is better just to accept unless someone has figures that show different.
I would be delighted to be proved wrong on this.
Nick
Received on Mon Jan 16 10:11:21 2006