Re: MES-1 deficient

From: Brendan Murray/DUB/Lotus (brendan_murray@lotus.com)
Date: Thu Mar 09 2000 - 11:58:08 EST


As Otto Stoltx pointed out:
>>From Annex F of CWA/MES:2000:
>> Comments accompanying Johan van Wingen's Negative ballot:
>...
>> Should the three MESs be approved, then these may be adopted by
>> industry. Then we may be forced to include MES-2 in our systems.
>> We have calculated that this would take NLG 11 million to do that.
>> Thus we consider continuing the Work Item to be in conflict with
>> our national interests.
>
> Apparently, the same considerations hold for Germany, Austria, and
> Switzerland (with a correspondingly enhanced figure, of course).

This is a critical point. This specifically refers to issues around
resource costs (Font licensing, increased memory, etc.). The reality
is that it's a lot cheaper, easier, and enhances compatibility
enormously if one totally disregards this report and implements full
Unicode support. Then the only issue is one of fonts, and one can
purchase a pretty wide variety of fonts for NLG 11 million.

The rationale behind this report totally eludes me: why on earth
does one want to create a locale (or set of locales)-specific
subset of Unicode/10646? To add insult to injury, this report
has the gall to suggest multiple subsets, increasing complexity
by a huge amount.

It's a *lot* cheaper and a *lot* easier to implement full
Unicode support than multiple subsets which aren't particularly
compatible with anything else, and which obviously ignore
clear requirements of some of the languages: I'm not convinced
that the fraktur or long s should be in MES-1, but the omission
of the quotes indicates that the report is simply not up to
scratch.

The part I really like about this report is the line on page 1:
"This CEN workshop agreement can in no way be held as being an
official standard developed by CEN and its members".

I'm curious: who were the people who agreed to this? The report
suggests contacting the CEN/ISSS Secretariat to identify them,
although it conveniently omits how to; I think I'll ask.

B=



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:59 EDT