Why wouldn`t I use UTF-8?

Question

Seems like UTF-8 is the best standard to use.
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-utf8/

So why are so many east asian web pages using CJK scripts like Shift_JIS, EUC_JP etc.

Why not use UTF-8 for everything?

Answer 1

Here are some disadvantages:

- A badly-written (and not compliant with current versions of the standard) UTF-8 parser could accept a number of different pseudo-UTF-8 representations and convert them to the same Unicode output. This provides a way for information to leak past validation routines designed to process data in its eight-bit representation.

- UTF-8 encoded text is larger than the appropriate single-byte encoding for everything except diacritic-free, Latin-alphabet text.

- Single byte per character encodings make string cutting easy even with simple-minded APIs.

- UTF-8 encoded text is generally larger than the appropriate multi-byte encoding for everything except diacritic-free, Latin-alphabet text. Latin letters with diacritics and characters from other alphabetic scripts typically take one byte per character in the appropriate multi-byte encoding but take two in UTF-8. East Asian scripts generally have two bytes per character in their multi-byte encodings yet take three bytes per character in UTF-8.

Answer 2

Microsoft is the reason for non-standard UTF-8. Linux is UTF-8. Microsoft has the 2-digit country code, first 2 hex numbers for every document file, as a "cheat" for which language. UTF-8 should be better but maybe the East Asia is without documentation and keyboard functionality for UTF-8 in their alphabets. That is my guess.



But, it has always been a suggestion of mine that China would dominate the USA by purchasing Microsoft and converting code to simplified chinese.

Answer 3

quite simply they want to break the microsoft stranglehold