Re: ISO 10646 compliance and EU law

From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@leca-marti.org)
Date: Tue Jan 04 2005 - 14:50:27 CST

  • Next message: Mike Ayers: "RE: ISO 10646 compliance and EU law"

    On Tuesday, January 4th, 2005 19:22Z Kenneth Whistler va escriure:
    >
    > But getting back on topic, Antoine Leca commented:
    >
    >> Also, conformance to 10646 (very different from compliance to
    >> Unicode) requires the mention of the UTF, the implementation level
    >> and the collections used.
    >
    > I wouldn't draw quite the same conclusions.
    >
    > 10646 states:
    >
    > "A claim of conformance shall identify the adopted form, the
    > ^^^^^
    > adopted implementation level and the adopted subset by means of
    > a list of collections and/or characters."
    >
    > Note the crucial point -- this is about a *claim* of conformance.
    >
    > And this is the reason why the Unicode Standard includes,
    > in Appendix C.5, just such a claim, indicating (p. 1352) that
    > the Unicode Standard has the following features:
    >
    > * Numbered subset 305 (UNICODE 4.0)
    > * UTF-8, UTF-16, or UCS-4 (= UTF-32)
    > * Implementation level 3
    >
    > Unicode implementations can then implicitly derive their claims
    > of conformance to 10646 from Unicode's own claim of conformance,
    > as long as they then conform to the Unicode Standard itself.
    > This does not, of course, prevent an implementation from making
    > a more restricted claim of conformance, as in supporting only
    > a single Unicode Encoding Form or a much more restricted subset
    > of characters.

    Sorry: I did not check the exact meaning of the word "claim", nor did I have
    the needed legal background to read it right on the first shot.

    From what I read now, it seems that a "claim of conformance" can be
    transitive. I would not have think of it, but if this the law, let's conform
    to it. Just using UTF-16 as character set, and we are registered as
    conformant to ISO/IEC 10646. Nice, after all.

    Also, the original point was that "it is illegal [...] to sell non-ISO
    10646-compliant software in the EU." From what you are saying here, one way
    to achieve such conformance/compliance (another distinction I am not sure I
    get correctly) is to ship Unicode-conforming devices. I hope you are not
    implying it is the *only* way to achieve 10646-conformance ;-). (Yes, I did
    write the part I snipped where you're saying that it is unless the software
    is insignificant.)

    > However, *being* in conformance to 10646 doesn't necessarily involve
    > making an explicit claim of conformance.

    Then what is the purpose of the whole section?
    How does someone assure this? (I guess I do not masterize ISO 9000 enough to
    have it right, yet I seem to remember you have to write something somewhere
    sometimes)

    Antoine



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