On Wed, 19 Sep 2001, Rick McGowan wrote:
> > If ISCII is still being developed does this suggest that Unicode and its ISO
> > equivalent move too slowly?
>
> ISCII dates back to 1988 with a revision in 1990. It's not "still being
> developed" -- as far as I know, it's a stable standard that is under
> routine maintenance.
>
> I wonder if anyone has yet corresponded with the people who put up the
> almost unbelievable misconceptions on the two web pages mentioned
> yesterday? At least a note could go to the site owners, I would think.
>
> Rick
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
I agree that the 1991 version of ISCII has been stable for representation
of Indian scripts of Indian origin. I do not know if a standard for
encoding of Perso-Arabic script for Urdu, Sindhi, etc. has advanced beyond
being "envisaged" as mentioned in my earlier note.
The term ISSCII (for Indian script standard code for information
interchange) dates back at least to the July 1983 report of Government
of India's Sub-Committee on Standardization of Indian Scripts and Their
Codes for for Information Processing entitled "Standardization of Indian
script codes for information interchange. (I'm not sure when the second
'S' was dropped.) Page iv of the 1991 standard is devoted to history and
begins: "Since the 70s, different commitees of the Department of Official
Langauges and the Department of Electronic (DOE) have been evolving
different codes and keyboards which would cater to all the Indian scripts
due to their common phonetic structure." Besides the 1983 version it
mentions ones of 1986 and 1988. The 1983 report cites a March 1981
"interim report".
Regards,
Jim Agenbroad ( [EMAIL PROTECTED] )
The above are purely personal opinions, not necessarily the official
views of any government or any agency of any.
Phone: 202 707-9612; Fax: 202 707-0955; US mail: I.T.S. Dev.Gp.4, Library
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