Relationship between Unicode and 10646 (was: Re: Shift-JIS conversion.)

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Thu Nov 25 2004 - 15:59:06 CST

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    Philippe Verdy <verdy underscore p at wanadoo dot fr> wrote:

    >> UTF-8 is an encoding of the Unicode character set.
    >
    > More exactly, UTF-8 is an encoding of the ISO/IEC 10646 character
    > set...
    >
    > Unicode by itself is not a character set, only an implementation of
    > the ISO/IEC 10646 character set...
    >
    > Of course the Unicode technical commitee may propose new assignments
    > to ISO/IEC, but this is still ISO/IEC 10646 which maintains the
    > repertoire and approves or rejects the proposals. A new character
    > proposal may be rejected by Unicode, but accepted by ISO/IEC 10646;
    > and it is the ISO/IEC 10646 vote that prevails (so Unicode will have
    > to accept this ISO/IEC decision, even if it has voted against it in a
    > prior decision).

    I'd have to defer to the actual UTC and WG2 members, but my feeling is
    that this badly misrepresents the relationship between Unicode and
    10646, and between their respective standardization bodies.

    My impression is that Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 are two distinct
    standards, administered respectively by UTC and ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2,
    which have pledged to work together to keep the standards perfectly
    aligned and interoperable, because it would be destructive to both
    standards to do otherwise. I don't think of it at all as the "slave and
    master" relationship Philippe describes.

    -Doug Ewell
     Fullerton, California
     http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/

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