https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29005

Cibu C J <[email protected]> changed:

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--- Comment #26 from Cibu C J <[email protected]> 2011-12-16 22:41:51 UTC ---
Unicode didn't add the Malayalam Chillu characters on a whim. It was added
after around 2 years of deliberations. UTC finally concluded that, practice
existed before 5.1 was problematic and standalone characters has to be defined
for Malayalam Chillus.

It is a misreading of the standard that it specifies two different encodings
for chillus. There is only one encoding and that is the standard chillus
defined in 5.1. What standard says is, the rendering implementations should be
prepared to handle the pre-existing data that was present, before chillus were
properly defined. So, if at all you are converting the codepoints, that should
be from pre-existing sequences to standard chillus.

Also, keep in mind that never these two sequences (standard chillus, and
pre-existing sequence counterparts) will be canonically equivalent. Characters
has to be marked canonically equivalent when they are defined. That didn't
happen; so it will never happen as per the rules.

We don't need to play UTC here. Rather, we should be thinking about what is
best for the Malayalam users. If you take the stock of things today from the
implementation point of view, it is like this:

Standard chillus(>=5.1):
- All rendering systems support them because they are plain simple characters
without any special joining properties. If the font has it, rendering engine
can display it.
- Almost all Malayalam fonts support it. In case of fonts like Rachana, Meera
etc, even though original version does not have the chillu characters, there
are versions available with the standard chillus.

Pre-existing non-standard chillus(<5.1):
- In case of rendering systems it is a hit or miss. Some browsers in some
systems can display them correctly - example. Firefox + Linux, Chrome + Windows
etc. Some others cannot display them. For example, Chrome + Linux.
- All Malayalam fonts support them.

Since this is about WebFonts, fonts are in Wikimedia's control, but the
rendering systems are not. So you should be going with the option that would
fetch maximum support from rendering systems.

Also, I want to mention the original political positions of Santhosh and me.
Santhosh was arguing against standalone chillus and I was arguing for it.
However, decision has been made by UTC years back. Now it is time for
implementations to follow the standard so that a standard will be beneficial to
its users. Wikimedia should not get stuck in Unicode 5.0 and it should progress
to later versions as the Unicode standard progresses.

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