Re: Unicode normative value [was. Re: VS: "French+" support by Unicode]

From: JFC Morfin (jefsey@jefsey.com)
Date: Wed Apr 16 2008 - 18:24:06 CDT

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    At 11:54 15/04/2008, Andrew West wrote:
    > > At 03:12 15/04/2008, John C Klensin wrote:
    > > I'm
    > > not aware of any standards being developed in parallel in both
    > > languages. Usually English was the development language,
    > > perhaps occasionally French, but not both.
    >
    >ISO/IEC 14651 (International string ordering and comparison) is
    >developed in both French and English, in parallel, and as anyone
    >involved in the process can verify, it is a complete nightmare, with
    >the working group meetings bogged down in endless hours of niggling
    >over the differences between the French and the English texts.
    >
    >Andrew

    Dear Andrew,
    I am afraid, this "niggling" is precisely what removes French and
    English pragmatic, permiting to get the best out of the French and
    English semantic, warranting better universal interintelligibility.
    We currently observe another niggling for years at IETF IDNA and LSR,
    without any possibility of satisfactory solution because the niggling
    is over things they never agreed with their users first.

    I feel this is precisely the difference between a norm (multinational
    standard) and a standard which cannot internationalize.

    I doubt Microsoft would have survived that process trying to force
    OOXML. The question is now will ISO survive not having not applied
    its own rules in accepting OOXML. We lived this kind of niggling in
    the RFC 4646 case, which permitted an interoperable text out of a too
    confuse proposition.

    jfc



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