Big5 Usage Trends

Usage Big5 on Web sites dropped from 3.5% in 2010 to 1.0% in 2015, as more and more Web sites are using UTF8 now.

An interesting report, "Historical yearly trends in the usage of character encodings for websites" at w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/character_encoding/ms/y shows the usage trend of Big5 on Web sites together with GBK and other encodings:

Encoding      2010  2011  2012  2013  2014  2015  2016  2017  2018  2019
------------ ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
UTF-8        50.6% 59.8% 68.0% 74.7% 78.7% 82.3% 86.0% 88.2% 90.5% 92.8%
ISO-8859-1   28.6% 22.0% 17.2% 13.5% 10.8%  9.3%  6.9%  5.5%  4.3%  3.6%
Windows-1251  4.3%  3.7%  3.3%  2.8%  2.7%  2.2%  1.9%  1.7%  1.5%  1.1%
Shift JIS     3.1%  2.2%  1.7%  1.4%  1.4%  1.3%  1.1%  1.0%  0.8%  0.4%
GB2312        3.5%  4.4%  3.6%  2.5%  2.0%  1.4%  0.9%  0.8%  0.6%  0.4%
Windows-1252  3.2%  2.3%  1.7%  1.3%  1.3%  1.1%  1.0%  0.9%  0.7%  0.7%
EUC-KR        0.3%  0.2%  0.2%  0.2%  0.2%  0.4%  0.4%  0.4%  0.3%  0.3%
EUC-JP        0.7%  0.5%  0.4%  0.4%  0.4%  0.3%  0.3%  0.3%  0.2%  0.1%
GBK           0.7%  0.9%  0.9%  0.8%  0.6%  0.4%  0.3%  0.3%  0.2%  0.1%
ISO-8859-2    0.9%  0.7%  0.6%  0.5%  0.4%  0.3%  0.3%  0.2%  0.2%  0.1%
ISO-8859-15   0.5%  0.4%  0.4%  0.4%  0.3%  0.2%  0.2%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%
Windows-1256  1.2%  1.2%  0.8%  0.5%  0.3%  0.2%  0.2%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%
Windows-1250  0.4%  0.3%  0.3%  0.2%  0.2%  0.2%  0.2%  0.2%  0.1%  0.1%
ISO-8859-9    0.7%  0.5%  0.3%  0.3%  0.2%  0.2%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%
Big5          0.4%  0.3%  0.2%  0.2%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%
Windows-1254  0.4%  0.3%  0.2%  0.2%  0.2%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%  0.0%
Windows-874   0.2%  0.2%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%  0.0%  0.0%
US-ASCII      0.2%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%  0.1%  0.0%  0.0%  0.0%  0.0%
...

As you can see from the report, more and more Web sites are using UTF-8 (the standard Unicode Encoding) now, jumping from 50.6% in 2010 to 92.8% in 2019. At the same time, less and less Web sites are using Big5, dropping from 0.4% in 2010 to 0.1% in 2019.

So from the Web site point of view, usage of Big5 will soon become history.

Table of Contents

 About This Book

Introduction to Big5

 What Is Big5 Character Set

 What Is Big5 Encoding

 Big5 vs. Unicode

Big5 Usage Trends

 Big5Unicode.java - Big5 to Unicode Mapping

 Big5 to Unicode Mapping - Special Symbols

 Big5 to Unicode Mapping - Level 1 Characters

 Big5 to Unicode Mapping - Level 2 Characters

 UnicodeBig5.java - Unicode to Big5 Mapping

 Unicode to Big5 Mapping - All 13,461 Characters

 References of This Book - Big5 Tutorials

 Full Version in PDF/ePUB