- From: Jonathan Rosenne <rosenne@NetVision.net.il>
- Date: Sat, 07 Dec 1996 11:42:10 +0200
- To: "J.Larmouth" <J.Larmouth@iti.salford.ac.uk>
- Cc: www-international@w3.org
At 20:30 05/12/96 +0000, J.Larmouth wrote: >>Differences are larger for e.g. pure Japanese, it's about a >>50% overhead. For Indic scripts, the overhead is 200%. >>But then again, compression will reduce that overhead very >>nicely. > >Again, a very good (compression) point. BUT .... have I missed something? >Is compression for HTTP transfers becoming a de facto standard? (Or even a >technically agreed approach?) I think not. As was explained to me in one of the ISO 10646 meetings, compression should be considered a low level transmission issue, not a character code or high level protocol issue. When I ask my communications function to transmit some information it should be done in the most effiecient manner, and if compression helps it should be done without my involvement. Actually, most modern modems compress automatically, and you can see it happenning by watching the effective transfer rate of large files - my 28.8 modem often shows figures of 4 to 5K bytes/sec for uncompressed data, as opposed to 1.5 to 2.5 for .zip files. I remember reading that the compressed (ZIPed) size of Greek text was measured to be almost the same for the different encoding schemes, which isn't such a surprise considering Shannon's law. -- Jonathan Rosenne JR Consulting P O Box 33641, Tel Aviv, Israel Phone: +972 50 246 522 Fax: +972 9 956 7353 http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Jonathan_Rosenne/
Received on Saturday, 7 December 1996 04:42:05 UTC