Re: The Unicode Standard and ISO

From: Asmus Freytag via Unicode <unicode_at_unicode.org>
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2018 15:41:58 -0700

On Fri, 8 Jun 2018 13:33:20 -0700, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote:

[…]

There's no value added in creating "mirrors" of something that is successfully being developed and maintained under a different umbrella.

Wouldn’t the same be true for ISO/IEC 10646? It has no value added neither, and WG2 meetings could be merged with UTC meetings.
Unicode maintains the entire chain, from the roadmap to the production tool (that the Consortium ordered without paying a full license).

Without going into a lot of historical detail, the situations are not comparable; I don't think I agree to the way you summarize things here, but unfortunately I have not the time to elaborate further. It suffices to note that 10646 was and is a special case.

Not every attempt at standardization has to happen at ISO. Even on a treaty level there have always been other organizations, for example ITU.

Almost the worst thing you can do is duplicating an existing and well-established effort (by which I mean not a paper effort, but one that is being implemented widely). Doing so just adds needless complexity, but it will always satisfy people who are engaging in the kind of turf-war that makes them feel important.

A./

But the case is about part of the people who are eager to maintain an alternate forum, whereas the industry (i.e. the main users of the data) 
are interested in fast‐tracking character batches, and thus tend to shortcut the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC2 WG2. This is proof enough that applying 
the same logic than to ISO/IEC 15897, WG2 would be eliminated. The reason why it was not, is that Unicode was weaker and needed support 
from ISO/IEC to gain enough traction, despite the then‐ISO/IEC 10646 being useless in practice, as it pursued an unrealistic encoding scheme.
To overcome this, somebody in ISO started actively campaigning for the Unicode encoding model, encountering fierce resistance from fellow 
ISO people until he succeeded in teaching them real‐life computing. He had already invented and standardized the sorting method later used 
to create UCA and ISO/IEC 14651. I don’t believe that today everybody forgot about him.

Marcel

Received on Fri Jun 08 2018 - 17:42:02 CDT