From: Erkki Kolehmainen (erkki.kolehmainen@kotus.fi)
Date: Tue Jul 18 2006 - 08:12:44 CDT
Just a couple of comments on Philippe Verdy's note of 15.7.2006 on ISO
vs. Unicode:
By and large, ISO is not an organization run by governments. Its
membership consists of national standards organizations, most of which
are associations with their primary relation with all kinds of
industries. Each NSO sets its own rules (and fees) of participation and
representation. ISO doesn't have its own technical committee on
Information Technology, since JTC1 is a joint technical committee of ISO
and IEC, and both ISO and IEC members can vote in the final ballot.
Earlier in the process, each participating P-member, as defined at at
the SC level, has one vote (and the P-membership has a certain level of
activity as a prerequisite), the observers (O-members) can comment.
My experience with both ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2 (where I've in the last ten
years participated in many meetings of SC2 and its WG2 and now dissolved
WG3) and Unicode tells me that, of the two, Unicode is much more active
in pursuing character set standardization of rare or extinct scripts and
characters. Many national bodies tend to lose their interest in the work
of SC2 (if they ever had any) once their own character set problems have
been resolved, whereas the IT industry seems to better understand their
general responsibility for the common good. The Unicode Consortium seems
to also have a much better access to (academic) experts than the formal
standards organizations, since Unicode provides a unique, open worldwide
forum for debate. It should be noted, though, that SC2/WG2 meetings are
an open forum for experts to participate and submit proposals to.
The CLDR effort is another example of Unicode's success in dealing with
support for cultural diversity issues in ICT. Earlier attempts have met
with little if any success, but this one has grown strong. It can and
needs to be refined, and the errors that CLDR 1.4 still contains can be
corrected by the active participation of us all for CLDR 1.5.
Incidentally, one can seldom withdraw a standard. There are lots of
stabilized standards, though.
I hope this clarifies the general level picture. I could dwell into the
details, too, but I won't, at least for now.
Sincerely, Erkki I. Kolehmainen
Philippe Verdy wrote:
> From: "Sinnathurai Srivas" <sisrivas@blueyonder.co.uk>
>
>>Unicode is not functioning properly, because ISO will not let go the ISO.
>>ISO will not anounce the deprecation of ISO 8859-x. This means Unicode will
>>not get through ISO systems.
>>
>
> ISO does not have to endorse Unicode (for now), because Unicode is a separate standard body with distinct membership conditions and policies.
>
...
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