Re: Claims of Conformance (was: Re: CLDR and ICU)

You may still use the terms "Universal Character Set". However, claims
of conformance is declarative. It may have unexpected bugs soemwhere
in which cas the claim should come with either a disclaimer of
warranty, or with a reliable contact address for the support to have
these conformance bugs corrected or more reliably detected and avoided
possibly with discussed workarounds.

But as long as the conformance is not proven false, such a use of the
expression "conforms to the Unicode standard" along with the
disclaimer of warranty or with the support offer with limted liability
of the author or distributor should be OK. However for references to
the character encodings, it will still be better to use the registered
encoding abbreviations of the supported UTF's. Conformane to a
standard UTF does not mean full conformance with everything in TUS.

For example I can still see many fonts that claim to be made for
Unicode, or in Unicode version. They are not more conformant than many
fonts that do not claim it, only because they support only a smaller
subset of the UCS. There does not exist any font that fully supports
every characters assigned in the Unicode/ISO/IEC 10646 standards, but
stil there are claims in the used font names (without clarifications).
In my opinoon all those claims are false, simply because there's no
conformance rules defined in TUS for fonts (almost everything in those
claims is not found in fonts thelselves, but in rendering engines,
wich are parsing the text and trying to map glyph using the separate
specifications of the supported font formats).

2012/7/27 Andrew West <andrewcwest_at_gmail.com>:
> On 27 July 2012 00:42, Ken Whistler <kenw_at_sybase.com> wrote:
>>
>> It is a whole nother kettle of fish when somebody says of their product
>> "This product conforms to the Unicode Standard, Version 6.2.0." There
>> would be nothing misleading about their use of the Unicode Mark in
>> such a case -- they are actually referring to the actual standard which
>> claims the trademark. The reference is not misleading.
>
> Yet such a claim would be "wrong" according to the Trademark Policy
> page, because they omitted the ® symbol and used the word "conforms"
> (they should have stated "This product is compliant with the Unicode®
> Standard, Version 6.2.0."). The page clearly states that any claim of
> conformance is not allowed to be made if the Unicode Word Mark
> guidelines are not followed (e.g. omitting the ® after Unicode, or
> using a verb other than "use", "implement", "support", or "are
> compliant with"), which implies that any wrongly formulated or
> formatted claims of conformance are null and void, and should not be
> accepted by potential users of the product.
>
> I am sure we have discussed how stupid this page is on this list
> before, and I for one refuse in principal to add the ® symbol to
> Unicode when, for example, I claim conformance to the Unicode 6.1
> normalization algorithm for BabelPad. Perhaps people should be wary
> of using my software because the Unicode Word Mark is misused, but
> more likely they will think that Unicode's (oops!) trademark policy is
> a little bit silly.
>
> Andrew
>
>
Received on Thu Jul 26 2012 - 20:32:50 CDT