RE: Request for egistration of character set TSCII for TAMIL language

[Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com>]

> TSCII as an established language encoding is already recognized by
> major IT players like the Unicode Consortium, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle
> and Sun Microsystems. With OS-level support for Tamil in Microsoft
> Windows 2000 and later OS releases and very recently in Apple's Mac OS
> X 10.4 (Tiger) release, Tamil Diaspora has started to use Unicode
> already. The Purpose of this formal registration with IETF is to
> facilitate migration of the vast amounts of legacy data in TSCII and
> multitude of users.

This statement appears to be inaccurate since Microsoft doesn't actually
support TSCII, although there are 3rd party apps and workarounds that
may provide limited support on Windows machines.  We do support Tamil in
the Unicode space, but that's not the same as supporting the TSCII
charset.

This registration might be interesting in supporting conversion of
legacy data to a more compatible encoding such as Unicode, but it
shouldn't be misleading about the level of support that the TSCII
encoding has.  Microsoft would recommend Unicode for accurate exchange
of Tamil data.
 
- Shawn

Shawn Steele
SDE
Windows International
Microsoft