From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Dec 08 2003 - 20:46:38 EST
Mark Shoulson wondered:
> >And not complete. That is simply the draft for the PDAM
> >(preliminary draft amendment) to 10646. It will be subject
> >to national ballot comments, which will, no doubt, result
> >in further additions, as well as some minor modifications to
> >what is currently there. And then it will go to *another*
> >round of ballotting after that, the FPDAM ("F" for final),
> >where more changes could happen.
> >
> So it's a "Final Preliminary Draft Amendment"? And then eventually the
> "We Really Mean It, This Is *It* Preliminary Draft Amendment"? And THEN
> maybe it gets out of preliminary and all the way to "draft"?? Wow. The
> wheels sure turn slowly.
Such is the way of ISO, and the price of keeping Unicode in
synch with the official International Standard, ISO/IEC 10646.
For the character encoding mavens who would like to file
away trivia material to amaze (or bore) your friends at holiday
parties, here are the stages for ISO/JTC1 standards
development:
Standard: CD FCD DIS IS
Amendment: PDAM FPDAM DAM AMD
Where CD is "Committee Draft"
FCD is "Final Committee Draft"
DIS is "Draft International Standard"
IS is (published) International Standard
PDAM is "Preliminary Draft Amendment"
FPDAM is "Final Preliminary Draft Amendment"
DAM is "Draft Amendment"
AMD is (published) Amendment.
The difference between "CD-stage" and "FCD-stage" is
mostly administrative. The FCD-stage can be ballotted
for a slightly shorter period, and is usually done
based on what is considered an almost complete and
ready-to-approve document. The "CD-stage" is more
typical of a less-developed document, and can be,
and sometimes is repeated successively during some
standards' development cycle. Luckily, for 10646,
the relevant committee (SC2/WG2) has never had to
do repeate PDAM ballots.
And don't be fooled by the "Draft" designation in the
"DIS-stage", which also applies to DAM's. At that point,
the technical committee is done with the document, and
no technical changes are allowed in the text. It
is merely the last, officium pro officio level of ballotting,
which in our case consists of a thumbs up/thumbs down
vote at the JTC1 level. After that the document goes
directly into publication.
> Kind of like a white Black Mariah or a blue RedHerring...
Or a CLOSED REVERSED OPEN E.
> >Only after *that* will the UTC feel confident that the
> >dust has settled enough to standardize the results as
> >Unicode 4.1. Don't be expecting any of this to be
> >final this year, or even *next* year. The next character
> >additions to the Unicode Standard are likely to be
> >published in early 2005.
> >
> Wow.
Yep, them's the tea leaves. I mean it when I say that it
takes several year's of perserverance to actually encode
new characters or scripts in the standard, from start to
finish.
--Ken
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