From: Michael Everson (everson@evertype.com)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 19:51:34 EDT
At 23:00 +0200 2003-05-22, Philippe Verdy wrote:
>There are clearly two paths to have new characters encoded with
>Unicode: either by formal proposal by an independant group or vendor
>that has enough influence to have Unicode map existing encodings to
>codepoints, then Unicode prosing this new subset to ISO10646, or
>using the ISO procedure which is much more bureaucratic, and where
>national states and their standard authorities have a large
>influence.
This is NOT how it works.
>The agreement between the bureaucratic ISO10646 and the independant
>Unicode (which accepts proposal from influent provided that they
>donate time and money) requires some part of bureaucracy for Unicode
>members, and some oppenness from ISO to adapt to the market demand
>given via Unicode.
This is NOT how it works.
>The question is then who represents the best the interest of a
>communauty: a national standard organization working with ISO, or
>groups of users asking for change to their software vendors that
>work with Unicode, with less political decisions...
This is NOT how it works.
>Generally, searchers and linguists prefer to work with librarians
>and with their national standard organization, so they tend to use
>the more bureaucratic way via ISO10646, unless they have already
>existing large databases of pulications for which they ask a
>standard to Unicode to facilitate compatible interchanges...
This is NOT how it works.
>The case of independant groups of users (for example Klingon
>supporters, or searchers studying an archaic or minor language which
>only interests a poor country without public support from national
>librarians) is difficult here: their work reaches an insufficient
>audience to have marketability, so they get little or no support
>from influent Unicode members. Also they are recognized by no
>national standard organism and can't influence ISO10646. The
>critical decision will come with support by publishers if these
>users can get the money needed to finance their publication.
This is NOT how it works.
-- Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
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