utf88

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Observed mentions: 2014-10-27 23:25:18 UTC to 2015-06-27 12:29:44 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
Oct 2014	2014-10-01 00:00:00 UTC	2014-11-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Nov 2014	2014-11-01 00:00:00 UTC	2014-12-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Dec 2014	2014-12-01 00:00:00 UTC	2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jan 2015	2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2015-02-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Feb 2015	2015-02-01 00:00:00 UTC	2015-03-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Mar 2015	2015-03-01 00:00:00 UTC	2015-04-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Apr 2015	2015-04-01 00:00:00 UTC	2015-05-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
May 2015	2015-05-01 00:00:00 UTC	2015-06-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Jun 2015	2015-06-01 00:00:00 UTC	2015-07-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2

What Hacker News says

5 sources

jekub·Jun 27, 2015

> see https://github.com/gavingroovygrover/utf88 This is the most stupid way to extend UTF-8 I've seen. The only acceptable solution is to remove the restriction of using only four byte per sequence which would allow to encode these easily keeping all the advantages of UTF-8. Doing it like they does add an additional layer of encoding and so a lot of complexity a room for bugs. It was probably made for compatibility but a lot of software will do bad thing with these new "surrogate" pairs so this solution is not really more compatible in practice. And updating software to handle UTF-8 sequence longer than 4 bytes is a lot more easier than updating them to handle such encoding.

In What to know about encodings and character sets

vorg·Jun 27, 2015

> It basically defines a ginormous table of 1,114,112 code points that can be used for all sorts of letters and symbols. That's plenty to encode all existing, pre-historian and future characters mankind knows about. There's even an unofficial section for Klingon. Indeed, Unicode is big enough to allow for unofficial, private-use areas. The private use areas only encode about 137,000 codepoints (U+e000 to U+f8ff & U+f0000 to U+10ffff) and are running out quickly. Most of U+e000 to U+f8ff is used by many different private agreements, and some pseudo-public ones like the Conscript registry which encodes Klingon, linked to in the article. Conscript also uses a large chunk of plane F to encode the constructed script Kinya, i.e. the 3696 codepoints in U+f0000 to U+f0e6f, see http://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/charts/PDF/UF0000.pdf . It takes up

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so much room because it's a block script like Korean Hangul and is encoded by formula just like Hangul. Each Korean Hangul block is made up of 2 or 3 jamo: one of 19 leading consonants, one of 21 vowels, and optionally one of 27 trailing consonants, giving a total of 19 * 21 * 28 = 11,172 possible syllable blocks, generated by formula into range U+ac00 to U+d7a3. Kinya also uses such a formula to generate its script, and I'm sure many other constructed block scripts will make their way into the quasi-official Conscript Registry. I'm even working on one of my own. In fact, rather than filling up U+f0000 to U+10ffff, such conscripts only need to fill up the first quarter of it (i.e. U+f0000 to U+f7fff) for Unicode to run out of private use space, because the remainder (U+f8000 to U+10ffff) is needed for a second-tier surrogate system (see https://github.com/gavingroovygrover/utf88 ) to extend the codepoint space back up to 1 billionish codepoints as it was originally specified by Pike and Thompson until it was clipped back down to 1 million in 2003. So Unicode is not "plenty to encode" or "big enough to allow for" all known, future, or private-use characters.

In What to know about encodings and character sets

vorg·May 27, 2015

> But we don't seem to be running out The issue isn't the quantity of unassigned codepoints, it's how many private use ones are available, only 137,000 of them. Publicly available private use schemes such as ConScript are fast filling up this space, mainly by encoding block characters in the same way Unicode encodes Korean Hangul, i.e. by using a formula over a small set of base components to generate all the block characters. My own surrogate scheme, UTF-88, implemented in Go at https://github.com/gavingroovygrover/utf88 , expands the number of UTF-8 codepoints to 2 billion as originally specified by using the top 75% of the private use codepoints as 2nd tier surrogates. This scheme can easily be fitted on top of UTF-16 instead. I've taken the liberty in this scheme of making 16 planes (0x10 to 0x1F) available as private use; the rest ar

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e unassigned. I created this scheme to help in using a formulaic method to generate a commonly used subset of the CJK characters, perhaps in the codepoints which would be 6 bytes under UTF-8. It would be more difficult than the Hangul scheme because CJK characters are built recursively. If successful, I'd look at pitching the UTF-88 surrogation scheme for UTF-16 and having UTF-8 and UTF-32 officially extended to 2 billion characters.

In The WTF-8 encoding

vorg·Jan 20, 2015

You can define a second-tier surrogate system in UTF-16 on the last 2 planes (plane 0xF and plane 0x10), which are both private use, to access all codepoints up to 0x7FFFFFFF. Use plane 0xF as leading 2nd-tier surrogates, and plane 0x10 as trailing 2nd-tier surrogates. I've written a package in go that does just that: https://github.com/gavingroovygrover/utf88

In Decoding UTF-8 with Parser Combinators

vorg·Oct 27, 2014

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description describes Ken Thompson's original proposal for UTF-8 with codepoints up to U+7FFFFFFF, and how the upper limit was reduced to U+10FFFF in 2003. I've actually written a package for Go https://github.com/gavingroovygrover/utf88 that uses the 2 private use planes to implement a surrogate system that restores that upper limit to UTF-8, which could easily also be applied to UTF-16 and UTF-32. It's all part of looking forward to the day UTF-8 as originally specified is reinstated.

In I � Unicode [pdf]