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

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.

JK


[1] http://www.acharya.gen.in:8080/multi_sys/intro_ind_lang.php

Received on Friday, 2 January 2015 16:12:35 UTC