Could I get hold of an electronic copy of the relevant pages of Unicode for
the preparation of a proposal to ammend ISO 10646?
Regards,
Jony Rosenne
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
From: Olle Jarnefors <ojarnef@ADMIN.KTH.SE>
Subject: Re: RFC 1556
To: Multiple recipients of list ILAN-H <ILAN-H@taunivm.tau.ac.il>
In-Reply-To: <3184@sesame.demon.co.uk> (Tue, 02 Jul 1996 08:58:28 GMT; From:
Paul@sesame.demon.co.uk (John Clews))
John Clews wrote, quoting Doron Shikmoni:
> > I believe this also represents Machon Hatkanim's view these days
> > (in the relevant committees). There seems to be a consensus that
> > the only solid, reliable and specifiable implicit bidi algorithm
> > is Unicode, and that there should be an effort to specify it in
> > all places, to help it become a de-facto standard and not just
> > a de-jure one.
>
> Is it _even_ a de jure one? Are there any international standards which
> relate to this (i.e. ISO/IEC standards?)
If you regard only standards under the ISO/IEC umbrella
as _de jure_ standards, then the Unicode bidi algorithm is
not such a standard. ISO 10646 _allows_ its use by
including the special characters needed, but their
semantics is only incompletely described in 10646, in the
_informative_ annex D. Alternatively, bidi text can be
coded in 10646 by using control functions from ISO 6429.
The Arabic and Hebrew parts of ISO 8859 specifies 8-bit
code values for Arabic and Hebrew letters but are silent
about the practically not unimportant issue of in which
order these should be placed when representing texts
longer than 1 character.
If Israeli or Arabic standard organizations are convinced
that the Unicode bidi algorithm is superior to whatever
ISO 6429 offers, they should definitely propose its
transformation into an ISO standard.
> Does anybody know if ISO/IEC
> JTC1/SC22/WG20 is dealing with this as well as IETF?
I don't know for sure if JTC1/SC22/WG20 is looking into
this, but JTC1/SC2 seems to me to be the proper ISO
committee for this fundamental issue in character coding.
The IETF will soon publish a specification of
internationalization extensions to HTML as a proposed
Internet standard. It is based on the Unicode method.
The latest version is available e.g. at:
<ftp://nic.nordu.net/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-html-i18n-04.txt>
/Olle
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