Standards for tamil computing

["Dr.K. Kalyanasundaram" <kalyan@igcsun3.epfl.ch>]

One of the goals of the present discussions in webmasters@tamil.net,
tamilnet@tamilnews.org.sg and of the Tamilnadu Advisory
Committee for Tamil Computing (TNC) and others is to go 
for possible standards for tamil computing. 
How are the standards established?
Once we all agree on possible standards for a font encoding scheme
for tamil font/softwares, keyboard layouts, transliteration schemes etc,
these recommendations are to be written up as  "Internet Request 
For Comments (or RFC) documents". 

Internet Request For Comments (or RFC) documents are the 
written definitions of the protocols and policies of the Internet. 
They are formally registered and widely
publicised soliciting comments for a short period of time. 
After this period, these RFCs become a kind of 'de facto' standards.
RFCs are periodically updated taking into account the advances
in technology and also any problems experienced with earlier versions.
Most of the computer hardware, software manufacturers try to
conform to their products to these RFC specifications to have a
large scale world-wide market.

For those of you (like me) who would like to learn more on these
RFCs (like those that are there for HTTP, PPP, TCP/IP etc), there is
a comprehensive web site for RFCs with the following URL:
    http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/information/rfc.html
There is a comprehensive index there, listing all of the RFCs 
produced till date (with webpointers):
       http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/htbin/rfc/rfc-index.html
Nearly 2200 RFCs are listed there! So this is a huge  (>500K) 
file so be prepared to wait for a while for it to download.
RFC 1345 summarises the character sets for many of the
european and non-european (asian) languages.

Possibly a parallel (or one that follows RFC) route is to get the
font encoding scheme registered under ISO 8859-X schemes.
ISO 8859 is a standardized series of 8bit character sets for writing 
in Western alphabetic languages. ISO 8859 is not even remotely as 
complete as Unicode, but it is already a major improvement over the
 7bit US-ASCII and something that is already well established.
It was designed by the European 
ComputerManufacturer's Association (ECMA) and approved as 
standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
This will be a more rigorous screening process but worth all
the effort. 

Once we have the standards established either as RFCs and/or
ISO standards, it will be very easy to convince computer
software industry to adopt these standards. Some time ago,
I did post a list of useful websites where one can learn more
about the 8859-X schemes and their relation to Unicode schemes.
For the benefit of those who missed, here I reproduce some of 
these sites:
EUROPEAN AND NON-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
 ON THE NET: A SURVEY OF PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS
   http://www.hf.uib.no/smi/ksv/char.html
ISO 8859 Alphabet soup
    http://wwwwbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~czyborra/charsets/
Pointers to information about ISO 8859
    http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/%7Eflavell/iso8859/iso8859-pointers.html
Internationalisation of HTML
    http://www.alis.com:8085/ietf/html/
Latin-1 (8859-1) and HTML
   http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~churchh/latin1.html
   http://www.twenteweb.nl/develop/informatie/html-spec/iso8859.html
Latin-1 (8859-1) and the Mac Platform
    http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/%7Eflavell/iso8859/iso8859-mac.html
   
http://www.cdg.chalmers.se/Chalmers/AppleTalk/ISO-8859-1/ISO-8859-1.html
Latin-2 (8859-2 ) scheme and its font resources
    http://sizif.mf.uni-lj.si/linux/cee/iso8859-2.html

Kalyan
--
*******************************************************************
Dr. K. Kalyanasundaram,            |
Institute of Physical Chemistry,   | Tel: 41-21-693 3622 (off)
Swiss Federal Inst. of Technology  | Fax: 41-21-693 4111
CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland      | Email:kalyanasundaram@epfl.ch
*******************************************************************