Re: Comparison algorithms in UNICODE

From: David Goldsmith (David_Goldsmith@taligent.com)
Date: Sat Aug 19 1995 - 23:21:33 EDT


At 5:36 AM 8/19/95, unicode@Unicode.ORG wrote:
>I also think it is a good move to go into the big character sets,
>but I think that you should call it ISO 10646 or UCS. UNICODE
>is in principle a proprietary standard. And encodings like
>UTF-8 are not UNICODE, but is 10646 and may well have
>a significant role to play in whois++

The only difference between the Unicode Consortium and ISO is that ISO is a
governmental body and Unicode is a non-profit corporation. Unicode isn't
proprietary. Are standards produced by X/Open, POSIX, or OMG proprietary?
They are all similar organizations.

I have no objection to standards based on ISO 10646, but some people think
(especially in IETF) that it is (currently) insufficiently specified
compared to Unicode. Although the character repertoires are the same,
Unicode specifies more about how to do presentation (e.g., the
bidirectional algorithm and the character composition model). This is why
the MIME charsets I did, including UTF-7, were specified in terms of
Unicode, even though I originally started out basing them on ISO 10646. I
don't think this will be a long-term problem, however.

David Goldsmith
Senior Scientist
Taligent, Inc.
10201 N. DeAnza Blvd.
Cupertino, CA 95014-2233
david_goldsmith@taligent.com



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