In a certain sense, thats what Reader's Digest Condensed Books are all about - lossy text compression.
But we let machines do it all the time too. Go from UTF-8 to ASCII-7. You won't loose much in English - orientation of quotation marks, distinction among various types of dashes. Naïve and Café and El Niño and other words borrowed from other languages and commonly spelt with their native character set would also need to be spelt differently.
You could drop down to 5 bits per character, giving you only upper case letters and room for 6 punctuations. Numerals would need to be spelt out, which means you could no longer distinguish among these: 1, One, ONE, one.
You can also find lots of lossy text compression, focused on minimizing characters, on Twitter or in text messages.
I hate it when I open a document and there's non-ASCII characters cluttering it up just because someone wanted magic quote marks. If you must have oriented quotes, you should do them the ``LaTeX way,'' so you don't have to get into Unicode, which sucks [1].
But we let machines do it all the time too. Go from UTF-8 to ASCII-7. You won't loose much in English - orientation of quotation marks, distinction among various types of dashes. Naïve and Café and El Niño and other words borrowed from other languages and commonly spelt with their native character set would also need to be spelt differently.
You could drop down to 5 bits per character, giving you only upper case letters and room for 6 punctuations. Numerals would need to be spelt out, which means you could no longer distinguish among these: 1, One, ONE, one.
You can also find lots of lossy text compression, focused on minimizing characters, on Twitter or in text messages.