Re:Emojis paved the way for UTF-8 everywhere
by crazygringo on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @03:52PM
(#25129670)
First, that's because European languages have small alphabets. It's not like Chinese or Japanese with their many thousands of characters could have fit in those 2,048 spots anyways. So it makes sense to allocate the small common alphabets there.
Second, text is so comparatively tiny relative to photos, video, code, etc. that it really doesn't matter at all anyways.
Third, text is often zipped as well. It's often zipped over HTTP. It's zipped when it sits inside of an EPUB. It's zipped when it sits inside a Word document. You can even configure MySQL to zip text fields in a database. Basically, whenever space is an issue, you can fix it.
So it's hard to see how this is any problem in practice at all, when phones and computers mostly ship with 32 GB of SSD minimum.
Second, text is so comparatively tiny relative to photos, video, code, etc. that it really doesn't matter at all anyways.
Third, text is often zipped as well. It's often zipped over HTTP. It's zipped when it sits inside of an EPUB. It's zipped when it sits inside a Word document. You can even configure MySQL to zip text fields in a database. Basically, whenever space is an issue, you can fix it.
So it's hard to see how this is any problem in practice at all, when phones and computers mostly ship with 32 GB of SSD minimum.