Re: "Interoperability is getting better" ... What does that mean?

From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela_at_cs.tut.fi>
Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:33:03 +0200

2013-01-08 23:56, Naena Guru wrote:

> May I ask if the following two are Latin script, English or Singhala?
>
> 1. This is written in English.
> 2. mee laþingaþa síhalayi.
>
> For me, both are Latin script and 1 is English and 2 is Singhala (says,'
> this is romanized Singhala').

Text 2 is “romanized Singhala” only by your private definition, and you
don’t even mean that. You are not actually promoting the use of Latin
letters to write Sinhala but to use a private 8-bit encoding for
Sinhala. You expect such a font to be used that the letter “a” is not
displayed as “a” but as something completely different, as a Sinhala
character.

It seems that your agenda here is something very different from the
Subject line you use – not about generalities, but about certain
fontistic trickery.

> http://www.lovatasinhala.com/

If you look at the title of the page as displayed in a browser’s tab
header or equivalent, you see “nivahal heøa”. This is what happens when
the font trickery fails (because browsers use their fixed fonts to
display such items).

The trickery is nothing new. It was used even when you had to use <font
face> on the web to use fonts, and at that time, the trickery was
analyzed and found wanting, see e.g.
http://alis.isoc.org/web_ml/html/fontface.en.html
There’s no reason to go into such analyses any more.

If you are happy with this or that trickery and don’t want them to be
analyzed, just use them. But please don’t expect the rest of the world
to go back to bad old days.

Yucca
Received on Tue Jan 08 2013 - 16:35:16 CST

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