Thing is its not going to be a character count, as the html markup content will be counted. So to say X chars would be less accurate than saying X bytes. At least the latter will be correct all the time, where a char count would be wrong almost all of the time.

Update: I see from the CB chatter history that you and ysth dont like this information to be displayed. I suggest one of you put together a patch to provide a user setting to turn it off. That would be the easiest thing for all concerned. :-)