Re: MES-1 deficient

From: Marion Gunn (mgunn@egt.ie)
Date: Thu Mar 09 2000 - 13:31:40 EST


Arsa Markus Kuhn:

> ...
>
> There is certainly a need for well-defined and easily quotable Unicode
> subsets, and the MES was one attempt to generate a family of these. I am
> not claiming that the result was particularly useful, especially
> considering the huge amount of silly politics that played a great role
> in this project.
>

One must remember that at the time this CWA was first mooted, full Unicode
support seemed quite some time away, most manufacturers expected it to be very
expensive to implement in full, and the original idea was not to produce
multiple subsets, but a single one, designed as a thumbnail guide for
manufacturers aiming to satisfy European user needs only, as a definable user
group (on a par with the user groups Markus mentions below). The emergence of
subsets was an attempt to meet one or two objections to the size of the set a
majority of members of the PT considered necessary to globally satisfy European
users. The work took much longer to complete, largely for political reasons of
the less constructive kind, but CEN Secretariat and the PT have produced, if
one just ignores MES-1, a set of references of some use to most manufacturers
operating in Europe.
mg

>
> Other national standards bodies have already defined their respective
> Unicode subrepertoires, e.g. JIS X 0221-1995 for Japan and GB 13000.1-93
> for China do exactly what MES does for Europe.
>
> Markus
>
> --
> Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
> Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

--
Marion Gunn
Everson Gunn Teoranta
<http://www.egt.ie>



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