Re: Transcoding Tamil in the presence of markup

[John Delacour]

It's not clear to me what you are saying. I have viewed markup-uc.htm 
with Safari and OmniWeb on the Mac and with IE 6.0.2800.11061S and 
Opera 7 on a machine running Windows NT4 and there is no major 
problem with the styled display which is precisely as you specify in 
the source.  Two things might just conceivably help other browsers 
along -- to use decimal rather than hexadecimal entities, and to 
declare utf-8 as the character set -- but this won't make a scrap of 
difference to a browser such as IE 5.2.3 for Mac (and many others) 
because it simply can't deal with anything that won't convert to 
standard legacy character sets.

I have come across several instances of Win IE 6 not diesplaying 
Unicode characters as it should or not at all and there are probably 
many such instances outside my experience -- whether due to the OS or 
to MSIE -- but a good up-to-date browser will not misbehave.

JD



At 7:39 pm +0100 6/12/03, Peter Jacobi wrote:

In Unicode:
 lA <span style='color:#00f'>&#x0BB2;</span>&#x0BBE;
 le <span style='color:#00f'>&#x0BB2;</span>&#x0BC6;
 lo <span style='color:#00f'>&#x0BB2;</span>&#x0BCA;
It is easy to see, that simple n:m mapping cannot make this conversion.
It is not that easy to judge whether this is the desired conversion at all.
And what should the receiving software should do with it.
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
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).
It's hard to promote Unicode, when things that have worked in the past,
stop working.