Re: [A12n-Collab] Re: [africa] 5 categories of African orthographies (Latin)

["Andrew Cunningham" <andrewc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, December 22, 2007 11:16 pm, Denis Jacquerye wrote:
>
It's rather disappointing and discouraging to see companies with i18n
> teams doing great work but totally failing in that aspect. Category
4
> orthographies (with composed characters) face numerous basic
issues
> Category 3 or 2 orthographies don't, not only at input
and display but
> also at the data handling level. There really
needs to be a greater
> awareness for the need of
normalization.

And considering web and software developers
associated with African language projects rarely do so, one would question
why developers non associated with African languages would consider doing
so.

In my country, most developers know little about
internationalization, there are some rare exceptions, but as a whole i
doubt the average developer has any knowledge or understanding of what it
means to support orthographies and languages that use combining
diacritics.

And since their clients rarely request such support
...

We're left in limbo.

Within the library sector,
library catalogues utilise a record format called MARC. MARC records can
be in a number of character encodings: MARC-8, EACC and Unicode.
Regardless of the character encoding used the MARC character model insists
on using combining diacritics even for the European languages.

With the migration to Unicode, many libraries complain about how
combining diacritics are displayed in web browsers. Rarely do any of the
libraries bother to lobby the vendors that develop their applications in
order to get them to improve their web interfaces.

It would be
straight forward to develop web UI's correctly in order to support
combining diacritics, and also to normalize web output using Unicode
Normalization Form C. But as a rule libraries don't bother. So vendors
don't bother.

Although some vendors do get their act together.
So there is some hope ;)

I suppose that this enough of a
rant.

I prefer to just get started and do stuff. So whenever we
work on web project intended to support various languages, we do consider
as many issues as we can, including ways to handle normalization, and
other issues.

Andrew
-- 
Andrew Cunningham
Research and Development Coordinator
Vicnet
State Library of
Victoria
Australia

andrewc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx