Standards

The Malayalam and Tamil Root Zone Label Generation Rules for International Domain names have been released for public comments. See the announcement from ICANN. This was drafted by the Neo-Brahmi Script Generation Panel (NBGP), in which I am also a member. Your comments on the proposal for the Malayalam Script Label Generation Rules for the Root Zone (LGR [XML, 18 KB] and supporting documentation [PDF, 998 KB]) can be submitted at the feedback form till Nov 7 2018. [Read More]

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) – Languages is responsible for the registration of language tags, subtags and script variants. These registered language tags are used in a wide set of internet standards and applications to identify and annotate language uniquely. Recently Sascha Brawer(currently working at Google) submitted a proposal to register two new language subtags for Malayalam to denote the orthography variations. Malayalam orthography had a diverging moment in history when Kerala government decided to script reformation in 1971. [Read More]

Recently, while preparing a critique for IDN Policy for Malayalam language prepared by CDAC, I noticed that ICANN does not allow control characters in the domain names. Sometime back I noticed Python 3 identifiers also does not allow control characters in the Identifiers. This blog post attempts to analyze the issue by looking at the Unicode and ICANN specifications about these special characters. Apart from the existing characters in Indic languages, Zero width Joiner and Zero width non joiners are widely used in Indic languages to control how the ligatures are formed. [Read More]