Re: Transcoding Tamil in the presence of markup

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Sat Dec 06 2003 - 15:37:39 EST

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    Peter Jacobi <peter underscore jacobi at gmx dot net> wrote:

    > Some tests: In Mozilla 1.4.1 the characters fall apart and in IE5.5
    > the style expands to the entire orthographic syllable.
    > Unicode test page: http://www.jodelpeter.de/i18n/tamil/markup-uc.htm
    > TSCII test page: http://www.jodelpeter.de/i18n/tamil/markup-tscii.htm

    BTW, your "Unicode test page" is marked:

    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
     content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

    while your TSCII test page is marked "x-user-defined". I'm not sure
    what either of those declarations accomplishes.

    > After seeing this effect at its source, it's now clear why you can't
    > style individual Tamil characters in a word processor, when using
    > Unicode (whereas you can do so, in legacy encodings).

    This is browser behavior, not word processor behavior, and certainly not
    an inherent defect in the Unicode logical-order model. Display engines
    need to do a better job of applying style to individual reordrant
    glyphs, that's all.

    > It's hard to promote Unicode, when things that have worked in the
    > past, stop working.

    This is alarmist and unnecessary.

    -Doug Ewell
     Fullerton, California
     http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/

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