L2/00-063

US comments on publishing ISO/IEC 10646-1 on the web 
2000-Feb-25


The US understands that ISO TMB and the IEC Councils have recently agreed with 
the JTC1 resolution to allow publishing ISO 10646-1 on the web in response to 
requests from a variety of standards development organizations such as IETF and 
W3C as well as several national bodies of ISO and IEC.  The US supports the 
decision to publish this standard on the web.  The question, however, is whether
ISO Central Secretariat should publish the first edition (ISO/IEC 10646-1: 1993)
along with its 31 amendments and 3 corrigenda, which are available only in hard 
copy, or to publish the 2nd edition (ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000), which is available 
now in pdf format.  The US has the following requests on this issue:

1. The US requests that ISO publish ISO/IEC 10646-1: 2000 on its internal www 
site as soon as possible for access by the national bodies.

2. The US requests that ISO also publish ISO/IEC 10646-1: 2000 on its public www
site and make it freely available.

Rationale:

Unlike the first edition (ISO/IEC 10646-1: 1993), which exists as base document 
with 31 separate amendments, none of which are available as electronic 
documents, the second editions (ISO/IEC 10646-1: 2000) exist in electronic form 
as a single consolidated document.

The US cautions ISO and IEC that due to the changes in the amendments 
(particularly amendments 4, 5 and 17 that are incompatible with ISO/IEC 10646-1:
1993), failure to publish all of them with the base standard could open ISO to 
liability claims and lawsuits.

The US further believes that publishing the first edition of ISO/IEC 10646-1 and
its 31 amendments and 3 corrigenda, as separated documents, will be a major 
disservice to the users of the standard.  So many changes make it extremely 
difficult to use the standard and to understand the full implications of the 
changes on the base 1993 standard.  Such difficulty will likely encourage the 
users to buy the more readily available book, The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0,
for 50 USD.

Including the consolidated text of the second edition makes the 1993 standard a 
little easier to understand.  By not presenting the Korean Hangul code tables of
the original edition, ISO would avoid disseminating information that has long 
been superseded by amendment 5.

However, the US also notes that ISO/IEC 10646-1: 1993 and many of its amendments
and corrigenda are unavailable in electronic format. Creating and then posting 
large scanned documents on the ISO www site may prove costly, impractical, and 
unworkable.  Because of their size and poor quality of the glyphs for the exotic
characters most people will decide to not download them, even if they are free. 
If people fail to download ISO/IEC 10646-1, then the ISO expense and effort to 
put it on the web become for naught.

Conclusion

The US understands the importance of revenue that is generated by the sale of 
standards by ISO, IEC and the national bodies.  The US is not requesting that 
all standards be available on the web for free.  Such a decision needs to be 
taken by ISO, IEC and the national bodies themselves.  Rather, the US believes 
that publishing ISO/IEC 10646-1: 2000 on the web is an exceptional case because 
of its immense value to the implementer and user communities. Therefore, the US 
requests that ISO make the ISO/IEC 10646-1: 2000 standard available on the ISO 
public web site as soon as possible.


[end of consolidated comments]