In a message dated 2002-01-20 21:49:02 Pacific Standard Time,
creativezeal@hotmail.com writes:
> The issue was originally brought up to gather opinion from members of this
> list as to whether UTF-8 or ISCII should be used for creating Devanagari web
> pages. The point is not to criticise Unicode but to gather opinions of
> informed persons (list members) and determine what is the best encoding for
> information interchange in South-Asian scripts...
It seems that the only point against Unicode compared to ISCII is the
resulting document size in bytes, and this one point is being given 100%
focus in the comparison.
If the actual question is, "What is the most efficient encoding for
Devanagari text, in terms of bytes, using only the most commonly encountered
encoding schemes and no external compression?" then of course you will have
loaded the question in favor of ISCII.
But when you consider that more browsers today around the world (not just in
India) are equipped to handle Unicode than ISCII, and that Unicode allows not
only the encoding of ASCII and Devanagari but the full complement of Indic
scripts (Oriya, Gujarati, Tamil...) as well as any other script on the planet
that you could realistically want to encode, you will probably have to
rethink the cost/benefit tradeoff of Unicode.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Mon Jan 21 2002 - 00:38:06 EST