Will web 3.0 use new character encoding?

Question

We all know web 2.0 uses UTF-8. Relevant to UTF-8,there are two more encoding format which are UTF-16,UTF-32 respectively. Will web 3.0 use new character encoding format.

Answer 1

I don't think so. UTF-16 needs 2 bytes per character and UTF-8 needs 1. On the internet that means it needs twice the bandwidth, which is bad news for slow internet connections.

But: This only applies to english. In languages that do not use the latin alphabet, UTF-16 can actually be *more* efficient. If the chinese achieve world dominance, maybe? For latin we could also use gzip to "compress away" the wasted space.

But²: Code is written in latin script so UTF-16 is mostly a waste for HTML, CSS, etc.

Actually, you can use UTF-16 on the web right now if you want to. It's just that UTF-8 is better most of the time and the space savings outweigh the benefits that UTF-16 would bring (it's slightly easier to process). UTF-16 is not common on the web but nothing is stopping you from using it (or UCS-2 rather).

By all means if you have a specialized app where UTF-16 makes sense, go for it, but UTF-8 is a better default I think and it will probably stay that way. (UTF-32? no way.)

Tricky question :)