From: John H. Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Fri Apr 01 2005 - 16:17:06 CST
On Apr 1, 2005, at 2:45 PM, Sinnathurai Srivas wrote:
> It calls Aytham as VisargaL.
>
Well, the charts actually say U+0B83 is called TAMIL SIGN VISARGA
with a notation "= aytham".
It may be appropriate to make this clearer to casual users, but
again, Unicode character names are not intended to be descriptive.
They are intended to be unique. Considerable effort has gone into
making them descriptive, but mistakes have been made which cannot now
be fixed. U+0B83 is not the only character to thus suffer.
> It is wrong. It is technically wrong. It does not do what Visarga
> migt do! It is not Visarga. It breaks Unicode implementations,
> because of it's untru descriptive name.
Anyone who implements Unicode based on the names of characters is not
implementing the standard correctly. Again, U+0B83 is not unique in
this regard. Unicode is more than a collection of glyphs in charts
or names of characters.
> It is an insult to a suffering minority language.
>
It is certainly not intended as an insult, any more than the
standard's failure to encode "ff" and "ll" as separate characters is
intended as an insult to Welsh. The insult would rather lie with
those who don't care enough about Tamil to learn how to implement it
properly in Unicode.
I realize that this is an issue about which you care passionately,
and your passionate devotion to the correct implementation of Tamil
does you credit. But please understand that character renaming
simply is not an option at this point in the standard's history. If
you wish to provide constructive suggestions, then among the things
which *can* be done are:
1) Additional annotations to the name
2) Additions to the FAQ
3) Additions to the standard's text on implementing Tamil
========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
jhjenkins@mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/
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