From: Andrew Lipscomb (ewwa@chattanooga.net)
Date: Thu May 25 2006 - 13:42:09 CDT
> On 5/24/2006 7:43 PM, J Andrew Lipscomb wrote:
>> There's a difference. Unicode itself has stability policies (the
>> wisdom of which I state no opinion on, but that ship has
>> sailed). The
>> CLDR, a more recent import into the Unicode Consortium's
>> operations,
>> is another matter, and does not have stability policies.
>>
>>
>>
> The difference is that the Unicode Standard is about the
> representation
> of textual data. Once encoded, the interpretation of such data
> must
> remain stable - otherwise we will be cut off from our history.
>
> CLDR is about cataloging conventions. Conventions are living
> constructs
> and subject to change. If it is deemed useful at some point to
> explicitly preserve 'historical' conventions, a mechanism could be
> invented in CLDR to preserve previous, but now outdated
> conventions. In
> such a case, I would not be surprised to see guarantees preventing
> the
> change of such 'frozen' conventions.
>
> However, that's not the current model for the CLDR.
Thanks for filling in that background for me. Although I don't see
why it is important to preserve the history of brakcets ::) (that
particular issue being of more technical than theoretical import,
I understand).
And I can actually think of cases where CLDR data would be based
on historical conventions--namely, the pre-euro versions of the
EMU locales. But that would still apply only to the currency
formatting there, not to the rest of the data.
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