Marion Gunn wrote:
> If you read my msg, you will see that I (carefully) never referred to
> Unicode's 'original purpose', Ken, only to what I understood to be its
> 'agreed purpose' in relation to implementing 10646,
Well, Marion, I carefully read your message before I replied, and after
carefully rereading it, I note that you did not refer to Unicode's
'agreed purpose' -- in fact never used those words. What you did say
was:
"after an unsteady and argumentative start, its
founders committed Unicode to the IMPLEMENTATION of10646, and became
very specific (loud) about not calling it a STANDARD (note to newcomers
- check out the archives of the relevant lists)."
which I consider to be a demonstrably false claim.
> an agreement reached
> after argumentation, which we need not repeat here, caused by your
> initial decision to set up a competing standard [sic].
More on this "[sic]" below.*
>
> > That was two years *before* ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 was published.
>
> How many years does it take to get ISO/IEC work item accepted, then
> develop the corresponding Standard to publication stage, Ken?
In the case of 10646, approximately 10 years, Marion.
> More than
> two? Several, as you well know: 10646 work was already _years_ under way
> before the 'Articles of Incorporation' of Unicode were filed.
Yes, I know that, Marion. That wasn't the point in contention. I was
responding to the presupposition involved in your statement:
"I expected the ad hoc Uncode
consortium itself to voluntarily disband in 3-5 years (wrong again)
having successfully fulfilled its brief of producing implementations of
10646 with flying colours (again wrong, as it has yet to do that)."
It was not the Unicode Consortium's "brief [to] produc[e] implementations
of 10646", so you were wrong about that, too.
> > ...
> > This was and is quite clear. The Unicode Consortium is a standardization
> > organization, and its activities revolve around the care and support
> > of the Unicode Standard. It never has been a group just dedicated to
> > figuring out how to implement 10646...
>
> Yet that is the basis on which those already involved in 10646 accepted
> it, and, to put it quite bluntly, what those of us who accepted it
> wanted then was to put an end of the hard-sell by global IT vendors of
> faulty software (unable to display or sort the standard characters
> needed by 100s of languages), and an 10646-Unicode agreement seemed the
> best way to end that (I still think it is, and strongly support it).
Well, then, perhaps we have something to agree about, after all.
>
> To conclude on a lighter note, if one tinged with black humour - Dublin
> being home to 3 universities at the cutting edge of IT - why - of awl da
> bars in awl da wurrall - did Unicode pick on a hotel favoured by myself,
> my friends and my workmates - then ship into that space a provincial
> university for full-day workshop & the Éire/Ireland seat on several
> panels? Hard to ignore.:-)
Not a very light note at all. For those who can't cut through
the smoke and mirrors of the "humour" this is an veiled insult
aimed at Reinhard Schäler of the Localisation Research Centre
of the University of Limerick, who participated at IUC #21 in Dublin
in May. And if the worthies of Trinity College, UCD and DCU had
actually wanted to participate in IUC, all they had to do was get
off their grandee butts and submit paper and session proposals
like everyone else who participated. :-)
--Ken
* Note on "[sic]". The implication here, of course, is that the Unicode
Standard could not really have been a "standard", despite the fact
that it was published under that name, was treated that way by
people implementing it, and was developed by an consortium whose
bylaws claim it to be a standardization organization. This seems
to be a stance taken by people who, for one rhetorical reason or
another, want to associate the word "standard" exclusively with
the ISO definition of an "International Standard", despite the
manifest evidence that there are multiple different types of
organizations busily producing standards that influence the IT
industry.
A refreshing antidote to this kind of narrow-mindedness can be
found in "Scaffolding the New Web: Standards and Standards Policy
for the Digital Economy", by Libicki, Schneider, Frelinger, and
Slomovic, 2000. ISBN 0-8330-2858-8. Example:
"Standards development is a very pragmatic process, and there
appears to be little barrier to new forms arising as need
dictates. Ten years ago, virtually everything of note was done
through formally established standards development organizations.
Three new forms now vie for contention -- plus the evanescent
small-group consortia growing prominent in the E-commerce arena."
-- p. 27
[The 3 new forms referred to are represented by the IETF, the
W3C, and the Open Source movement.]
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