Daniel Q said:
> still a little confused as to _why_ there are two different
> entities promoting the same standard
It's basically a historical accident. I should jokingly say we're all lucky
there are ONLY two organizations involved. We could have been in a much
worse situation.
The short-short story is that Unicode was happily doing one thing and ISO
another, and after some consultation they decided to combine the efforts and
cooperate to achieve ONLY ONE "ordering and repertoire".
Now we have two organizations that are concentrating on rather different
aspects of a single encoding upon which they agree.
Unicode Inc concentrates on describing the standard in sufficient detail and
with sufficient adjunct information that separate implementations are as
easy, consistent, and inter-operable as possible.
ISO WG2 concentrates on marshalling the resources of National standards
bodies and their respective pools of expertise, and on getting broad-based
international concensus for the standard, as well as being the nexus for
communication with OTHER international standards bodies.
As a whole, the process works rather well.
Rick
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