Re: [xml-dev] Ten Years Later - XML 1.0 Fifth Edition?

[Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@redhat.com>]

Elliotte Harold wrote:
> XML has much better support for more languages than any word processor 
> or operating system I've ever seen. (Here I do mean the end user 
> definition of an OS such as Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, etc; not just 
> the CS definition of OS)
>
> Maybe there's a Linux distro somewhere that supports Cherokee, 
> Cambodian, or Amharic. There certainly isn't Windows or Mac OS X that 
> does though.

I used polytonic Greek Unicode for years before I had an operating 
system that really supported it. And I did this largely in XML, which 
fortunately did not prohibit characters in the language I cared about. I 
had to use tools that most people using the operating system did not 
use. If you have a font, a keyboard driver, and an editing environment 
that support your language, you're able to do most things.

I'm using Fedora 8. Just for laughs I went to Alan Wood's Cherokee page 
to try out the first language you mention:

http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/cherokee.html

It displayed properly using Firefox. I tried copying this to 
OpenOffice's word processor, it did not display properly, and switching 
to the Gentium font didn't seem to help. But I also copied it into 
gedit, where it worked perfectly.

I wasn't able to find a keyboard driver for Cherokee, we don't seem to 
ship one as part of our standard distribution ;-> 

I didn't try any of these with the other languages (my time for such 
things is limited).

Jonathan