Which really isn't a very serious concern at this point, considering how cheap storage and compression are.
What's expensive to store are images and sound, from an ever increasing number of devices at an ever higher resolution. The production and storage of text barely registers in comparison.
Text size is still relevant due to bandwidth and reliability of transmission. Not everyone has a gigabit internet connection--large portions of the world are still operating on 2G wireless, or even dialup.
Definitely.
I would be interested to know of any good statistics on data size of real-world non-European language webpages in UTF-8 vs. UTF-16 and also with/without compression.
Much of the markup will be smaller in UTF-8 but actual text content would be smaller in UTF-16.
There was an experiment (see https://bug416411.bmoattachments.org/attachment.cgi?id=30307... for the results). that switched all the UTF-16 internal strings in Firefox to UTF-8. It found that UTF-8 lowered memory usage, even on text-heavy East Asian pages. Keep in mind that things like tag names or attribute names are all interned, so there's no space savings from, say, compressing <img src="">.
> This happens for pure text[nb 2] but actual documents often contain enough spaces and line terminators, numbers (digits 0–9), and HTML or XML or wiki markup characters, that they are shorter in UTF-8. For example, both the Japanese UTF-8 and the Hindi Unicode articles on Wikipedia take more space in UTF-16 than in UTF-8.[nb 3]
Many "developing" countries never even deployed 2G and dial-up to any great extent. They were simply too poor to build large-scale telephone network infrastructure. When they did start getting connectivity in the late 1990s and 2000s, they were able to skip straight to the latest generation of technology.
This is a pattern we see all over the world — the wealth advantage of "developed" nations is offset by their historical investment in infrastructure that is no longer state-of-the-art.
For example, the London Underground has been in operation for over a hundred years. The newest bits are great, but the oldest parts are hamstrung by design decisions made in the Victorian era. Whereas, when China builds a new metro, it's able to build every part of it to modern standards, applying the accumulated knowledge from building those earlier metros.
> Not everyone has a gigabit internet connection--large portions of the world are still operating on 2G wireless, or even dialup.
Sure, the majority of people have moved over to 3G or better worldwide, but there are still many areas where 2G is more common. We just did a deployment in India[1] which still has more 2G coverage than 3G. Performance on 2G connections was a requirement from our Indian business partners.
It's also worth noting that your link contains an implicit bias: it's measuring connections, not people. People with slower connections sometimes simply won't connect at all if your site doesn't perform on their connection, so this is always going to skew toward faster connections. Your link is also pretty vague on the actual statistics--given their claim that the vast majority of countries have > 3G availability 75% of the time, 25% of the majority of countries could not have > 3G availability, and if the vast minority country is India, that's hundreds of millions of people.
Yes, the majority of the world is on 3G or better, but the minority can still contain millions and millions of people.
What's expensive to store are images and sound, from an ever increasing number of devices at an ever higher resolution. The production and storage of text barely registers in comparison.