Thank you Goliath.
On another subject, I think the script you dreamed of as a boy is very
nearly fuþorc. foþorc is the (Old) English alphabet.
Thank you.
On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 1:54 PM, Doug Ewell <doug_at_ewellic.org> wrote:
> [removing cc list]
>
>
> Naena Guru wrote:
>
> On this 4th of July, let me quote James Madison:
>>
>
> [quote from Madison irrelevant to character encoding principles snipped]
>
>
> 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.
>>
>
> Unicode encodes Latin characters in their own block, and Sinhala
> characters in their own block. Many of us disagree with a solution to
> encode Sinhala characters as though they were merely Latin characters with
> different shapes, and agree with the Unicode solution to encode them as
> separate characters. This is a technical matter.
>
> I see the problem. This is what confused Philippe too. This is primarily a
transliteration. Transliterations go from one script to another. Not one
Unicode code block (I said code page earlier with an old habit) to another.
So, let's take the font issue out for the time being and concentrate on the
transliteration.
A transliteration scheme is a solution for a problem and has a technology
platform it is made for. Older (predecessor of) IAST Sanskrit and PTS Pali
were solutions made with letterpress printing in mind. They used dots and
bars for accents because they could be improvised easily in the street-side
printing presses. That was 1800s. Suddenly with computers, accented letters
became hard to get. HK Sanskrit made Sanskrit friendly for the computer by
limiting it to ASCII. Now, after electronic communication became cleaner,
we expanded the 7-bit set to full-byte set. Now iso-8859-1 set is available
everywhere.
> Earlier I said the Plain Text idea is bad too.
>>
>
> And many of us disagree with that rather vehemently as well, for many
> reasons.
>
>
> The responses came as attacks on *my* solution than in defense of Unicode
>> Singhala.
>>
>
> It's not personal unless you wish to make it personal. You came onto the
> Unicode mailing list, a place unsurprisingly filled with people who believe
> the Unicode model is a superior if not perfect character encoding model,
> and claimed that encoding Sinhala as if it were Latin (and requiring a
> special font to see the Sinhala glyphs) is a better model. Are you really
> surprised that some people here disagree with you? If you write to a Linux
> mailing list that Linux is terrible and Microsoft Windows is wonderful, you
> will see pushback there too.
>
> Here is a defense of Unicode Sinhala: it allows you, me, or anyone else to
> create, read, search, and sort plain text in Sinhala, optionally with any
> other script or combination of scripts in the same text, using any of a
> fairly wide variety of fonts, rendering engines, and applications.
>
>
> The purpose of designating naenaguru@gmail.com as a spammer is to
>> prevent criticism.
>>
>
> The list administrator, Sarasvati, can speak to this issue. Every mailing
> list, every single one, has rules concerning the conduct of posters. I note
> that your post made it to the list, though, so I'm not sure what you're on
> about.
>
>
> It is shameful that a standards organization belonging to corporations of
>> repute resorts to censorship like bureaucrats and academics of little Lanka.
>>
>
> Do not attempt to represent this as a David and Goliath battle between the
> big bad Unicode Consortium and poor little Sri Lanka or its citizens. This
> is a technical matter.
>
>
> I ask you to reconsider:
>> As a way of explaining Romanized Singhala, I made some improvements to
>> 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.
>>
>
> The fundamental model is still one of representing Sinhala text using
> Latin characters, and relying on a font switch. It is still completely
> antithetical to the Unicode model.
>
>
> 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).
>>
>
> You didn't read what Philippe wrote. Representing Sinhala characters in
> UTF-8 takes *fewer* bytes, typically less than half, compared to using
> numeric character references like සිංහ&#**3517;
> ලිවී&#**3512;ට ඉහල.
>
>
> 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.
>>
>
> A font that places glyphs for one character in the code space defined for
> a fundamentally different character is generally referred to as a hack (or
> hacked) font. A Latin-only font that placed a glyph looking like 'B' in the
> space reserved for 'A' would also be a hacked font.
>
>
> 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<http://lovatasinhala.com/assayaa.htm>
>>
>
> You need to stop making this "religion" accusation. This is a technical
> matter.
>
> This is the last attempt I will make to help show YOU where the water is.
>
> --
> Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA
> http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell
>
>
>
Received on Sat Jul 07 2012 - 17:52:07 CDT
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