L2/99-141

Liaison Report from SC22/WG20 Internationalization


Title:  Liaison Report from SC22/WG20 Internationalization
Source: Ken Whistler
Status: For Information
Action: None required
Date:   May 12, 1999

The WG20 Internationalization working group of SC22 met
May 3-7 in Malvern, Pennsylvania. The meeting was hosted by
Unisys.

The following is a short summary of what transpired at that
meeting, organized by project.

1. ISO/IEC 14651 International string ordering

The committee spent a grueling 3 full days doing detailed resolution
of 55+ pages of comments on the 2nd FCD ballot document. The good
news is that consensus was reached on all outstanding technical
issues. The bad news is that the required changes to the document
are so extensive that it was clear that yet another round of
technical ballotting will be required. The draft for the 3rd FCD
ballot is under preparation, and should be issued on 1999-06-01.

The impact of the required changes is mostly on the text portion
of the standard, but there were also some relatively minor
changes to the Common Template Table. Some of these changes had
to do with the formatting of entries and with the specification
of fourth-level weights for decompositions that have no impact
on the weight tables for the Unicode Collation Algorithm. But
others do modify the table in ways that should be reflected into
the Unicode Collation Algorithm tables, to keep the two sets of tables
as much in synch as possible. These changes included reordering
two Greek breathing mark diacritics and reordering a number of
Cyrillic characters to meet the GOST requirements that will also
be reflected in the table to be specified by the forthcoming
EOR (European Ordering Rules). Two other minor changes impact
the secondary weight for the oe ligature and move the primary
weights of Zhuang tone letters to make a more reasonable order.

The committee was optimistic that the 3rd FCD should finally be
stable enough to receive approval without significant further changes.
(Whew!)

2. ISO/IEC 14652 Specification method for cultural conventions

The committee addressed head-on the fact that this proposed
standard was not moving towards consensus acceptance--there is
still sustained (and vociferous) opposition from several national
bodies. A new round of ballotting will be begun on 1999-06-08, but
the convenor of WG20 and the editor of 14652 have agreed that the
status will be changed from a proposed international standard to
a proposed technical report. This change in status seemed to be
the only way to address the sustained, principled objection to
the enterprise.

The editor will be addressing the various technical comments on
the previous (2nd FCD) ballot. Given the change in status to
a technical report (which itself will not go unopposed), there
was an opening towards some compromise on the LC_CTYPE specification
portion of 14652 that has created such opposition within UTC.
It may be possible to come up with a compromise specification
that will let 14652 refer to Unicode tables
for most character properties, and only explicitly list those
deltas required for backwards compliance with existing POSIX
practice. Details will need to be worked out, however.

3. TR 10176 Guidelines for the preparation of programming languages.

The amendment for Annex A, the list of recommended characters for
identifiers, has been approved. Arnold Winkler was designated
the editor for this amendment.

4. ISO/IEC 15435 Internationalization API

No new working draft for this proposed international standard was
received by the committee, so work on this project was postponed
to the next meeting.

5. ISO/IEC 15897 Procedures for registration of cultural elements

This is the former ENV 12005, which was fast-tracked to an
international standard and assigned to WG20 for maintenance.
The editor of 15897 produced a brief plan for the revision of
the standard, and that plan was approved by the committee. The
editor will provide draft text with the suggested revisions--
most of which are rather minor. The main issue will be how to
provide an appropriate level for registration of FDCC-sets, now
that it appears that 14652 will be a technical report, rather than
a standard.

Other items:

Ken Whistler was appointed liaison officer from WG20 to the Unicode
Consortium.

The next meeting of WG20 will be held in Copenhagen, November 8-12,
1999.