Re: [EAI] Body parts

[Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com>]

Charles said:
> Actually, there may be good reasons for using other charsets in body
> parts. Charsets in the higher reaches of Unicode require rather long
> strings of bytes per character in UTF-8. That is not a serious issue for
> headers, but body parts might well be significantly shorter in charsets
> more suited to the language in use.

> Can anyone provide data on the efficiency of UTF-8 and BIG5, for example?

The presumed savings isn't actually very much.  Add an attachment, jpg, html encoding or whatnot and the "savings" will be lost in the noise.  I concede that it might be interesting for a satellite text message or something where the bandwidth is amazingly poor, however that could be handled by the device's portal/gateway.

The cost of not using UTF-8 is a compatibility.  The #1 globalization issue I see is related to code page incompatibilities and the #1 place I see problems is in e-mail.  Within the windows environment it is "only" because the system code page varies between machine, but between OS's or applications I also see a large difference in the supported character ranges, and variations in the supported character ranges.  Some standards are even inconsistent.

The IETF mail lists are common examples of this problem.  Many non-ASCII characters get lost in transmission, leading people to ask for Unicode code points or resending.  The additional emails alone negate any minor savings in encoding size.  The additional noise and lost information also hurts those who received the original mail as intended.

- Shawn
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