From: Sinnathurai Srivas (sisrivas@blueyonder.co.uk)
Date: Sat Jul 15 2006 - 16:23:29 CDT
Well, let me explicitly put a charge at ISO.
ISO8859-x was a working atandard. ISO should never invent nor accepts any
inventions while they are experimental.
ISO was extremly foolish to deny the chance to other languages which wished
or wishing to use a tried and tested encoding like 8859-x.
ISO was extremly foolish to think that a non-tested encoding will work.
after nealy 15 years, in computing terms is definitly an indication of
something seriouly wrong.
This (encoding) department of ISO seems to be run by less inteligent people,
as it in many important matters have taken anti-ISO decisions.
In this instant it is making standard a concept (Unicode or ISO 10646)
rather than stabdardising some working technologies.!!!!!
Standardising working technologies !!!!!
Standardising working technologies !!!!! should only be the responsibility
of ISO.
Standardising working technologies !!!!! should only be the responsibility
of ISO. Not inventing new technologies.!!!!
This department of ISO has miserably failed and they do not seems to care a
standard is not working proprly and they do not seem to care that they are
denying the use of tried and tested technology like 8859.
ISO do not seem to care that their promosie to do away with ISO (an illegal
code by now) is not been considered even after nearly 15 years.
ISO is a distructive force, as far as multilingual computing is concerned.
Regards
Sinnathurai Srivas
----- Original Message -----
From: "Philippe Verdy" <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr>
To: "Sinnathurai Srivas" <sisrivas@blueyonder.co.uk>; "Unicode Mailing List"
<unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Saturday, July 15, 2006 1:45 PM
Subject: Re: Frequent incorrect guesses by the charset autodetection in IE7
From: "Sinnathurai Srivas" <sisrivas@blueyonder.co.uk>
> Unicode is not functioning properly, because ISO will not let go the ISO.
> ISO will not anounce the deprecation of ISO 8859-x. This means Unicode
> will
> not get through ISO systems.
ISO does not have to endorse Unicode (for now), because Unicode is a
separate standard body with distinct membership conditions and policies.
ISO supports since long another project: ISO/IEC 10646 which is now fully
binary compatible with the Unicode standard since Unicode version 1.1 (for
the character encoding) and since Unicode 4.0 (regarding some standard
behavior, notably in UTFs).
But it may happen in some future that the Unicode consortium stops its
activities and some agreements are made so that ISO will manage the other
normative properties currently published by the Unicode consortium, by
having all works currently made by Unicode's TC and ISO's WG2 joined into a
single working group.
It could happen when most of Unicode work will be for extremely rare scripts
or academic scripts, and there's little interest for companies that are
members of Unicode to continue to finance alone those projects, as the
current languages supported are now stable; in ISO, governements may have
cultural interests to continue supporting the project for rare or extinct
scripts (some Unicode members are already reluctant to support the cost of
development for complex extinct scripts like Egyptian and Mayan
hieroglyphs... and academic resources are very limited so they have
difficulties to support the cost of their involvement in the standardization
process at Unicode.
But the organizations working in Unicode would like to extend the range of
standardization to other I18N and linguistic issues; this is already true as
the consortium now strongly supports the CLDR project (for a future
standard), and a few other standards (where the consortium acts as
candidates for maintaining the registry of other I18N-related ISO
standards). The consortium may even promote its projects for adoption as new
international standards at ISO.
Note that it is ISO that finally approves and standardize the extension of
the character repertoire (assignment of code points and blocks, character
names, and identity) not Unicode itself (Unicode's vote at UTC is
consultative at ISO, but Unicode has no direct right to vote at ISO, except
if it was chosen by governments to represent their interest in this area,
but note that representants at ISO do not represent their company or
organization but the country interests, so they cannot always support the
organization interests, when there are oppositions by other academic groups
or even competing organizations supported by the governement these
representants also represent at ISO; their "seat" is temporary, and
governments define themselves the rules under which candidate representants
can work); Unicode standardizes other properties, and works in collaboration
with ISO for the repertoire extension, and both standards are maintained in
sync, with simultaneous publication of updates (nearly, all extensions are
discussed by technical comitees and working groups at both standard bodies,
to get an agreement on the content that will be published
The decision to close the activities of the 7/8 bits encoded charsets is
justified; it does not close the works in this area, but does not require an
international standard; countries can still develop their own national 7/8
bit encodings if they wish (for example India can continue updating its
ISCII standard and map other scripts in it; and nothing forbids Morocco to
develop a 8 bit encoding standard for Tamazight), and they can even register
it in the IANA charset registry, but it no longer requires updating ISO 8859
(whose last update were for the official national languages of the European
Union, and for Celtic languages). Asian scripts are still supported through
ISO standards that have not been deprecated.
National standards, when they are approved for use in a country by one of
its official standard body, is still an important posibility; collaboration
between countries is still possible to develop a joint standard, but the
truth is that all newer 7/8 bit encoding would be supported by OS vendors
and programmers only if they have a well-defined mapping to ISO 10646.
Note that ISO work on 7/8 bits is just stalled: there's no agenda for new
works for now in this area, but it does not mean that extensions are
impossible in the future, if there are enough mutual agreement to reopen the
agenda for some extensions. Closing the schedule was just a pragmatic
decision to save costs and invest resources instead in the ISO 10646
standard, and let government alone decide how they will implement it
nationally and if they want to support an adaptation of ISO/IEC 10646 (and
optionally Unicode) for their national needs.
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