I have come across several instances of Win IE 6 not diesplaying Unicode characters as it should or not at all and there are probably many such instances outside my experience -- whether due to the OS or to MSIE -- but a good up-to-date browser will not misbehave.
JD
At 7:39 pm +0100 6/12/03, Peter Jacobi wrote:
In Unicode: lA <span style='color:#00f'>ல</span>ா le <span style='color:#00f'>ல</span>ெ lo <span style='color:#00f'>ல</span>ொ
It is easy to see, that simple n:m mapping cannot make this conversion. It is not that easy to judge whether this is the desired conversion at all. And what should the receiving software should do with it.
Some tests: In Mozilla 1.4.1 the characters fall apart and in IE5.5 the style expands to the entire orthographic syllable. Unicode test page: http://www.jodelpeter.de/i18n/tamil/markup-uc.htm TSCII test page: http://www.jodelpeter.de/i18n/tamil/markup-tscii.htm
After seeing this effect at its source, it's now clear why you can't style individual Tamil characters in a word processor, when using Unicode (whereas you can do so, in legacy encodings).
It's hard to promote Unicode, when things that have worked in the past, stop working.