Ethiopics XML Interest Group Formed

Ethiopics XML Interest Group Formed

An Ethiopics Interest Group that aims to define technical requirements and
standards for Ethiopic extension to XLM was recently established by
Ethiopian IT professionals and linguists. The Ethiopics Interest Group
(formally called EthiopicsXML Specifications Working Group) was established
as a response to the Blueberry Draft Proposal of the World Wide Web
consortium (W3C) to extend XML allowing the use of Ethiopic (and Khmer,
Myanmar, and Maldivian) script names in XML elements, attributes, and other
places.  It is currently possible to use Ethiopic script in the content of
an XML document, but the markup must be either in romanization or in another
language such as English or French. This omission of Ethiopics was a result
of XML having been standardized to support Unicode 2.0 (which was the then
current version of Unicode) which did not include Ethiopic script.

Ethiopia has its own unique script commonly called Ethiopics that is widely
adopted throughout the country by almost all the languages. A unique script
with more than 260 characters, 10 numerals and several punctuation marks,
Ethiopics has always been a challenge to adopt to computerization and now to
the Internet. 

The EthiopicsXML Specifications Working Group aims to:

*	Support the draft Blueberry requirement that is facing some
resistance.
*	Create or consolidate working groups and organizations with interest
in Ethiopics and XML.        
*	Educate the public on the need for inclusion of Ethiopics tags and
attributes to XML
*	Define technical objectives and requirements based on XML Blueberry
Requirements working-draft-of-20 June 2001. 
*	Bring topic for wider discussion once the specifications are
developed.  
*	Submit the proposal for specification to W3C Working Group 

A similar group was successful in drafting an encoding standard for
Ethiopics for Unicode 3.0 in 1993. 
 
The Blueberry draft document is published at 
http://www.w3c.org/TR/WD-xml-blueberry-req
 
The EthiopicsXML Specifications Working Group's mailing list is located at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EthiopicsXML

Sam Kassegne, PhD

Received on Tuesday, 23 October 2001 18:21:09 UTC