Problems
Both specifications suffer from the problem that standard communication protocols are built around octets rather than nonets, and so it would not be possible to exchange text in these formats without further encoding or specially designed protocols. This alone would probably be sufficient reason to consider their use impractical in most cases. However, this would be less of a problem with pure bit-stream communication protocols.
Furthermore, both UTF-9 and UTF-18 have specific problems of their own. UTF-9 requires special care when searching, as a shorter sequence can be found at the end of a longer sequence. This means that it is necessary to search backwards in order to find the start of the sequence. UTF-18 cannot represent all Unicode code points (although unlike UCS-2 it can represent all the planes that currently have non-private use code point assignments) making it a bad choice for a system that may need to support new languages (or rare CJK ideographs that are added after the SIP fills up) in the future.
Read more about this topic: UTF-9 And UTF-18
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