Aman Chawla wrote,
> > With regards to South Asia, where the most widely used modems are approx. 14 > kbps, maybe some 36 kbps and rarely 56 kbps, where broadband/DSL is mostly > unheard of, efficiency in data transmission is of paramount importance... > how can we convince the south asian user to create websites in an encoding > that would make his client's 14 kbps modem as effective (rather, > ineffective) as a 4.6 kbps modem? > This is a very good question. How, indeed? There are pros and cons for practically any situation and it seems that you are asking these questions in order to help evaluate those pros and cons. A while back, "Benefits of Unicode" was a very interesting thread on this list and the results of those discussions formed the basis for some web pages on the subject. Tex Texin made the original page about the benefits, which is on-line at: http://www.geocities.com/i18nguy/UnicodeBenefits.html The page offers links to other pages resulting from the same thread, including a page by Suzanne Topping listing some of the disadvantages of Unicode. One way to encourage members of your user community to embrace the standard might be to offer a translation of some of that material in Unicode Hindi, with the respective authors' permissions, of course, and post it on the web. With newer operating systems being Unicode-based, there are no special plug-ins or filters involved. A sophisticated and elegant writing system like Devanagari justifies having a clever rendering system for display. Unicode and OpenType support for such scripts are expected to be built-in to operating systems. As far as I can tell, under the current OpenType model, OpenType support for Indic scripts under ISCII encoding isn't possible because the features required not only for plain text Devanagari, but also for typographically advanced Devanagari are registered to the various Indic Unicode ranges. At least as far as Microsoft OS, a feature like the half-letter form won't be applied to anything encoded in the ASCII or ISO-8859-01 range. (Once again, as far as I can tell.) Encourage people to look towards the future. Studying the trend over the past several years as more groups and systems moved towards the Unicode Standard might foster the belief that anyone converting their existing files from a localized encoding into Unicode would be converting those files for the last time. On the other hand, converting from a localized encoding into ISCII would possibly mean that the material would eventually need to be converted into Unicode anyway. I agree with you that efficient and effective data transmission is extremely important and suggest that the most effective way to exchange data is in a standard fashion which is supported worldwide. Best regards, James Kass.
