Path: ...!weretis.net!feeder8.news.weretis.net!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail
From: Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Languages on the Web - A Timeline
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2024 12:14:09 +0000
Lines: 37
Message-ID: <87r06y9oq6.fsf@parhasard.net>
References: <vi1aqb$2mb23$1@dont-email.me>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Trace: individual.net VKTeP/YSPKD4E+v3yg1lKwAARA7e7GFyyhT6QlaoOGog5o31PD
Cancel-Lock: sha1:7/9OukliSY3tq+8Ug4Z7ta36Kqk= sha1:MosVQnzMekY03uIcrUTpqXw2bks= sha256:WuSyTr4B4JezYr1UFAOMjgfZ/V1tvrpMX6cXhrOYVwo=
User-Agent: Gnus/5.101 (Gnus v5.10.10) XEmacs/21.5-b35 (Linux-aarch64)
Bytes: 2347


 Ar an cúigiú lá is fiche de mí na Samhain, scríobh Ross Clark: 

 > The compiler of this recently posted a note about it to LinguistList.
 > 
 > https://marielebert.wordpress.com/2024/10/15/languages-web-timeline/
 > 
 > Some here may find it of interest, or worth comment.

Great to put names to the founders of various sites that I have known and used
for years. I note an inaccuracy:

  “January 2008:
  Unicode superseded ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)
  as the main encoding system on the web.
  Unicode (first published in January 1991) provides a unique number for every
  character, no matter the platform, the program and the language. The 16-bit
  encoding allows the processing, storage and interchange of text data in any
  language, while 7-bit ASCII (first published in 1963) can only process
  English, with 8-bit variants of ASCII (first published in 1986) for a few
  languages with diacritics.”
  
By that point most of the Unicode on the web was UTF-8, which can represent 
up to 1.1 million code points and did at that point represent 99,024 code
points, more than a 16-bit encoding can.

 > It is, of course, mainly historical, but Wikipedia has some interesting current
 > figures.
 > 
 > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet

I’m a little surprised Chinese isn’t higher in those figures.

-- 
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)