From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Nov 19 2003 - 16:42:32 EST
From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk@qaya.org>
> The problem here is surely that the application is conformant even if it
> doesn't claim or admit to supporting only this one character. It can
> print on the box "Now Unicode conformant!" and make this a major
> advertising feature, and no one can do anything about it. Now this is a
> ridiculous example. But a less ridiculous one is that an application or
> rendering system can claim to support Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and/or
> Arabic scripts according to Unicode when in fact it supports only small
> subsets (e.g. those required for major modern languages without
> diacritics), and still be conformant. It becomes very difficult for
> those of us who need support for ancient and/or minority languages to
> find conformant software.
Being conformant to Unicode does not mean anything else than not making
false interpretations of conforming data, and not generating non conforming
data when it's claimed that the operations performed are done according to
Unicode.
The need to exhibit Unicode conformance is not enough: users want support
for their languages, whatever which encoding is used. That's not the place
of Unicode, and other standards do exist or can be developped to specify
this conformance requirement.
One example is the set of MES subsets, or other common subsets which are
developed to exhibit a minimum support for several classes of languages. I
do think that it's a place for other ISO standards relevant to each
language, or to the ISO 10646-1 list of subsets.
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