At 16:50 -0400 2008-07-24, Jimmy Wales wrote:
It is not Unicode compliant and therefore violates the W3C recommendations for Internet use.
Yes, I understand that. I am just trying to educate myself....
I'm curt sometimes when I get technical.
PROs - freely licensed, available today, and popular
Other things are also popular. Zawgyi's proponants are vocal.
CONs - not Unicode compliant and therefore doomed in the long run and we should help try to get rid of it
Absolutely. The Wikipedia is a great triumph for Unicode. We want to support the Wikipedia; the Wikipedia should support Unicode. :-)
Okisan and his friends have their own wiki. I am sure many of the articles there have merit, and one day, when the my.wiki is ready, they can be transcoded and migrated.
That solution does not make me happy, though. It makes no sense for my.wikipedia.org to use a solution that most people can't read, and have the community grow up elsewhere.
In the meantime they can do good work, and then we can convert the whole thing and shut down their activity. I think Okisan suggested as much.
I want Myanmar Wikipedia to grow at my.wikipedia.org, with the rest of the global movement.
So do I. But it can't if it's not Unicode. Remember the government authorities (such as they are) are also supporting Unicode now. We do Burma no favours if we support anything but the same platform Microsoft will eventually support.
That doesn't mean I like non-Unicode fonts. But it does mean that I want us to take whatever steps we can to migrate people to Unicode as quickly as possible.
I've suggested getting my.wiki sorted out so that it is user friendly in terms of getting people fonts and input methods (like the Kannada and/or Telugu sites do). I think we should investigate compliant fonts and their capabilities, but them in the CSS ranked in terms of universality, clean up what needs cleaning up, and then work on the conversion of the other material.
That's the best I can think of.