Re: [CSS Counter Styles] Tamil (was: Minutes Santa Clara F2F 2014-10-28 Part III: Text, Selections, Counter Styles)

On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 7:04 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 2, 2015 10:15 AM, "Jonathan Kew" <jfkthame@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 2/1/15 14:53, Dael Jackson wrote:
>>
>>>    TabAtkins: One issue was about a handful of styles that browsers
>>>               have implemented but weren't in the draft since we cut
>>>               it down. I want to add the ones with high
>>>               interoperability.
>>>    TabAtkins: About 20 styles are implemented since they are
>>>               dependable for authors.
>>>    TabAtkins: The ones that aren't clear is the Tamil style, which is
>>>               only Firefox and this list:
>>>    <TabAtkins> afar, oromo, sidama, tigre
>>
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>>>    RESOLVED: Add to Counter Styles the additional styles supported by
>>>              2+ browsers (per r12a's email), do not add the styles
>>>              supported by only one browser.
>>
>>
>> AIUI, this implies that Tamil will be excluded from the predefined styles,
>> as it is currently supported only by Firefox.
>>
>> I believe this would be a very unfortunate situation. Tamil is one of the
>> nine basic scripts of India (see [1], for example):
>>
>>   Bengali
>>   Devanagari
>>   Gujarati
>>   Gurmukhi
>>   Kannada
>>   Malayalam
>>   Oriya [Odia]
>>   Tamil
>>   Telugu
>>
>> These are the Indic-family scripts used (along with Latin script, for
>> English, and the Perso-Arabic script for Urdu and Sindhi) to write the
>> official state languages of India, and form a clear, well-understood set
>> that are expected to be treated on an equal footing.
>>
>> To provide predefined counter styles for eight of these, and exclude the
>> ninth, will appear arbitrary and capricious; will be confusing to authors;
>> and may even lead to accusations of discrimination against one of India's
>> major linguistic communities.
>>
>> Please reconsider the status of Tamil. The nine major Indian scripts
>> should be supported as a set of equals, not divided into what will appear to
>> be first- and second-class citizens.
>
> Our decision to leave Tamil out was based on a simple impl-based criteria. I
> was not aware that we had included the other 8 major Indian languages. The
> hole is probably very obvious for Indian-language speakers, and
> unfortunately easy to misinterpret. I agree that we should include Tamil
> despite it having only one current implementation.

The WG agreed with your argument, and I've now added Tamil to the list
of predefined styles in the spec.

~TJ

Received on Thursday, 15 January 2015 21:31:16 UTC