Romanized Singhala - Think about it again

Pardon me for including a CC list. These are people who showed for and
against opinion.

On this 4th of July, let me quote James Madison:
A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government,
and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment
to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or
to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to
the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed
them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and
oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good.

I gave much thought to why many here at the Unicode mailing list reacted
badly to my saying that Unicode solution for Singhala is bad. Earlier I
said the Plain Text idea is bad too. The responses came as attacks on *my*
solution than in defense of Unicode Singhala. The purpose of designating
naenaguru@‌‌gmail.com as a spammer is to prevent criticism. It is shameful
that a standards organization belonging to corporations of repute resorts
to censorship like bureaucrats and academics of little Lanka.
*
I ask you to reconsider:*
As a way of explaining Romanized Singhala, I made some improvements to
www.LovataSinhala.com <http://www.lovatasinhala.com/>. Mainly, it now has
near the top of each page a link that says, ’switch the script’. That
switches the base font of the body tag of the page between the Latin and
Singhala typefaces. *Please read the smaller page that pops up.*

I also verified that I hadn’t left any Unicode characters outside
ISO-8859-1 in the source code -- HTML, JavaScript or CSS. The purpose of
declaring the character set as iso-8859-1 than utf-8 is to avoid doubling
and trebling the size of the page by utf-8. I think, if you have characters
outside iso-8859-1 and declare the page as such, you get
Character-not-found for those locations. (I may be wrong).

Philippe Verdy, obviously has spent a lot of time researching the web site
and even went as far as to check the faults of the web service provider,
Godaddy.com. He called my font a hack font without any proof of it. It has
only characters relevant to romanized Singhala within the SBCS. Most of the
work was in the PUA and Look-up Tables. I am reminded of Inspector Clouseau
that has many gadgets and in the end finds himself as the culprit.

I will still read and try those other things Philippe suggests, when I get
time. What is important for me is to improve on orthography rules and add
more Indic languages -- Devanagari and Tamil coming up.

As for those who do not want to think rationally and think Unicode is a
religion, I can only point to my dilemma:
http://lovatasinhala.com/assayaa.htm

Have a Happy Fourth of July!
Received on Wed Jul 04 2012 - 13:16:22 CDT