On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 7:43 PM, CherianTinu Abraham <tinucher...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi all, > Happened to see Gerard's blog post on issues with Malayalam Wikipedia > & Unicode upgrade to > 5.1 http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2010/12/malayalam-enigma.html
The issue is very complex. There were heated debates around this topic in Unicode Indic Mailing list for years. In short the issue is about dual encoding- representing a letter using two types of unicode character codes. Unicode's decision to bring the second encoding in standard was widely debated and opposed mainly by FOSS developer community from Malayalam. Unicode announced the dual encoding scheme without canonical equivalence definition in 2005 and reverted it when scholars and developers opposed it. The same proposal again introduced. Foss community, language scholars protested the proposal. The SMC community submitted a document with 17 reasons why dual encoding should not be introduced.- see http://wiki.smc.org.in/images/2/23/SMC_Unicode_5.1.pdf Similarly a seminar conducted to discuss the issue by University of Kerala opposed the proposal. see http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080131071131/fci/images/1/19/Report_of_Workshop.pdf But Unicode technical consortium did not bother to answer both of these reports and went ahead with the decision in Unicode 5.1. The dual encoding scheme is with out any canonical equivalence definition. Since it is not there in standard I doubt whether Operating systems will implement it, not to mention about search engines. Since the new encoding scheme is defined without backward compatibility, or against unicode's stability policy, Malayalam FOSS community decided not to implement it until issues are resolved and continuing with unicode 5.0 encoding. Malayalam news portals also follow unicode 5.0. Most of the tools from Google also continue with unicode 5.0 based encoding. Malayalam wikipedia decided to go ahead with latest version of unicode. I had resisted this move in the discussion pages of Malayalam wikipedia. The decision was taken based on voting by a small community of editors and not based on proper technical analysis. Believe it or not, this is how Malayalam wiki is rendered inWindows XP IE 8 box with OS default font: http://thottingal.in/tmp/ml-wiki-winxp-IE8.png I hope it gives some clue about the issue that Gerard mentioned. Most of the discussions happened around the encoding issue was in Malayalam(in Malayalam wiki or in blogs), but this English blog post might summarize it http://www.j4v4m4n.in/2009/11/07/unicode-or-malayalam/ Discussions happened in Malayalam wikipedia(content in Malayalam language) http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/വിക്കിപീഡിയ:പഞ്ചായത്ത്_(സാങ്കേതികം)/യൂണികോഡ്_5.1.0/ചർച്ച_(പഴയവ) Thanks Santhosh Thottingal http://thottingal.in _______________________________________________ Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l