From: Asmus Freytag (asmusf@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue Mar 02 2010 - 13:26:57 CST
On 3/2/2010 5:29 AM, Doug Ewell wrote:
> <announcements at unicode dot org> wrote:
>
>> The Unicode Consortium is revising the Unicode Standard Annexes for
>> eventual release of Unicode 6.0. A standard part of our development
>> process is to open all of the annexes for public review.
>
> I'm curious what the benefit is of creating a new revision of *all*
> UAXs, including those which have not changed. I quickly scanned a
> sample of four of the documents under review, and three of them (24,
> 29, 34) have no change except for boilerplate and copyright date
> (sometimes rendered as "20010," BTW). I know integers are cheap, but
> is this just a matter of following protocol or is there another benefit?
In some ways, it follows from the principle of the Unicode Standard as a
monolithic specification. If it had been broken apart into a series of
related specifications from the outset, some other approaches to
versioning might have been available. For many reasons, a monolithic
approach was instrumental to the early success and the adoption of
Unicode, so both the editors and the users are stuck now with the
current scheme.
The annexes are annexes, and in essence no different from chapters in
the book (or "core specification" as it is going to be called). When the
book was re-issued, each chapter got re-issued as well, whether or not
it had changed. And now that the whole text exists online for each minor
release, that's what's happening for the chapters as well.
The difference is that the headers for the UAXs are so much more
detailed, and that they seem more like independent specifications to the
casual reader.
In earlier years, UAXs were not all updated all the time, but this
proved really confusing, as you could never look at any one of them an
be sure you had the latest available version. Now, you only need one
version number and you can be sure to have the latest version of all
UAXs -- even if they are copies on your own harddisk.
A./
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