Andrew Cunningham wrote:
Although on the fly encoding transformations would be a step backwards for promoting uptake of Unicode 5.1.
It would provide less incentive for users to migrate to Unicode 5.1
I see it more as an opportunity to provide them an easy migration path. That is, if we are showing a page to someone in Zawgyi, we should put a big box on the page saying "You are using a out-dated font which does not meet web standards. Click here to learn more about this, and to upgrade to a modern font."
If encoding transformations are required, I'd suggest that rather than adding it to Mediawiki, such projects could be handled as an extesion or addon to a web browser, there are laready many similar projects for Firefox that handle encoding transformations, e.g. TISCII <-> Unicode, etc.
The only problem with this is that such extensions have to be downloaded and installed before they would work... whereas a conversion system allows unsophisticated users a way to get involved right away: we handle the tricky parts for them.
My understanding is that the site myanmarwikipedia.org is doing on the fly encoding transformations already, is that true? We can just use the same software, right? At least in theory?
--Jimbo