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.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Mon Jan 21 2002 - 05:09:56 EST