Hi all
2008/7/25 Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com>
Michael Everson wrote:
I see your point, though in terms of Zawgyi we
have a body of people who philosophically refuse
to upgrade.
That's odd. What reasons do they give?
Probably many reasons. Similar to the Vietnamese encoding wars before the
widespread adoption of Unicode.
And i suspect that lack of wide spread font rendering/text layout solutions
is part of that
But the prevalent use of that font in web pages and blogs is another factor
But as Jimmy commented on about communities building up, I suspect that
Zawgyi has had such a similar phenomenon, it is a mechanism of display etxt
in various social networks that have evolved on the internet. So people
becoem atatched to it.
But proper support of Burmese and minority langauges do call for Unicode 5.1
compliant solutions both short and long term.
As Michael indicates it is important to have solutions in place for Sanskirt
and minority langauges as well as Burmese on
my.wikipedia.org. To his list
i'd also add Pali.
I find myself in a difficult position, working for a state library, a SA. I
have to support licesing and copyright. Wether its open source, creative
commons, a commercial EULA. And Myanmar Unicode 5.1 solutions are relatively
hampered in the Windows environment by licensing issues.
Being involved with W3C inetrnationalisation activities, I strongly support
web standards and best practice, esp with respect to internationalisation
and accessibility (in its broadest sense) and from that perspective Unicode
5.1 is the best approach.
I'd agrue their should be a single community building articles for wikipedia
in Burmese. perosnally transcoding for end users is an posisble interim
measure. Although I'd suggets that editors are encouraged and aided in
migrating to Unicode 5.1, and that transcoding is left to supporting thaose
end users that require it.
Michael and others, I'd like to assist in analysing the fonts and CSS if
there is anyway I could help.
--
Andrew Cunningham
Vicnet Research and Development Coordinator
State Library of Victoria
Australia
andrewc(a)vicnet.net.au
lang.support(a)gmail.com