From: James Kass (jameskass@att.net)
Date: Sun Jul 16 2006 - 06:00:24 CDT
Doug Ewell replied to Sinnathurai Srivas,
> > As for Tamil attepts were made to encode Tamil for over 20 years now.
> > This was denied.
>
> Accusing large vendors of "ganging up" against Tamil makes a nice
> rallying cry -- "us against them," David versus Goliath -- but in fact
> there is no reason why Tamil users, Tamil industry consortia, or
> governmental organizations within Tamil-speaking regions could not have
> developed their own 8-bit encoding and propagated it throughout the
> industry. That is exactly what was done in Eastern Europe and elsewhere
> when existing character sets failed to meet the needs of vendors.
Hopefully, no one is calling "conspiracy".
8-bit encodings were devised by the various user communities.
The most popular is probably TSCII.
TSCII's draft proposal was published in late 1997, before operating
systems offered any kind of support for Unicode Indic script
rendering.
A quick web search failed to find any documentation supporting
the idea that there is some kind of moratorium on new ISO-8859-xx
pages, but I am under the impression that such is the case.
The existence of Unicode and ISO-10646 make 8-bit code pages
obsolete regardless of whether they are formally deprecated.
Quoting from http://www.tamil.net/tscii/tscii_draft.html
"... it is desirable to register the proposed standard code-set TSCII
as an international ISO standard."
My understanding is that efforts along those lines failed.
But, the user communities did attempt to propagate TSCII. For
example, Pango included support for TSCII in its first public
version.
Best regards,
James Kass
"We have just the place for ISO 8859-15 here in London.
It is called the Science Museum and is full of charming
historical relics, like Babagge's difference engine, used
by Ada Lovelace (I think that was her family name)."
- Misha Wolf, letter to the Unicode Public List
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