Re: [tlug] Why is Shift_JIS bad?

[Matt Gushee <mgushee@example.com>]

On Thu, Aug 29, 2002 at 09:57:54PM +0900, Jim Tittsler wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 29, 2002 at 09:39:52PM +0900, Ryan Shaw wrote:
> > If anyone out there can point me to something I
> > could read which might arm me with the knowledge
> > necessary to banish SJIS from my projects, I will
> > be forever (or at least a few weeks) in your debt.
> 
> I think one of Ka-Ping Yee's pages explains the problem rather
> graphically:
>   http://web.lfw.org/text/jp.html

That's nice, but he fails to mention that the problem is a little more
serious than the columns in the chart being oddly-shaped. In fact,
because of the code points it reserves for half-width katakana,
Shift-JIS has no space for the JIS-X-0212 character set--including over
5,000 "supplementary" kanji. Although they're certainly less frequently
used than JIS-X-0208 kanji, they're not exactly rare. A rough analogy
would be, I suppose, an encoding for English that excluded the letters
J, Q, X, and Z.

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee@example.com
http://www.havenrock.com/