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

[Mani Manivannan <mmanivannan@earthlink.net>]

Shawn Steele writes:

>> 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.

>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.

Shawn's conclusion is based on a misreading of the preamble.

The quoted statement doesn't say nor does it imply that there is OS-level support for TSCII encoding.  It says there is OS-level support for the Tamil language (using Unicode) and due to this support the Tamil diaspora has started to migrate to Unicode (away from TSCII and other encodings). It makes the case that since vast amount of Tamil content exists in TSCII encoding already, a formal registration of TSCII encoding will be able to assist those vendors that want to make these TSCII based content available to the OS (and search engine) users and help help migrate content in TSCII encoding to Unicode (or possibly other OS supported standard encodings).

Mani M. Manivannan
TSCII.ORG

-----Original Message-----
>From: Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com>
>Sent: Feb 26, 2007 5:06 PM
>To: ietf-charsets@iana.org
>Subject: RE: Request for egistration of character set TSCII for TAMIL language
>
>> 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
>