Only with "pure" CJK text in a flat text file; for most real-world situations you'll have enough ASCII text that UTF-8 will be smaller: HMTL/XML tags, email headers, things like that. I did some tests a few years back, and wasn't really able to come up with a real-world situation where UTF-16 is smaller. I'm sure some situations exist, but by and large, CJK users are better off with UTF-8.
Yep. I'm a heavy user of CJK languages and I don't give a damn about the slightly increased plaintext storage. Give me UTF-8 any day, every day. Legacy two-byte encodings can't represent all of the historical glyphs anyway, so there's no room for nationalist crap here.
Well, it's great that you did some tests a few years back, but I'm not sure how that qualifies you to make such a sweeping generalization about CJK text encoding. It's easy to dismiss UTF-16's benefits when you're only looking at a narrow slice of the real world, ignoring the vast amounts of pure CJK literature, historical archives, and user-generated content out there.
