Hi Markus, I disagree with your characterization of the delay in ISO standards.
A lot of loud mouths have made a lot of money talking about the delays in ISO and ITU-T standards and the "closed" procedures. But there are regular recent examples of ISO standards done on the "fast track" in 18 months from original proposal to the ISO member body to final International Standard. The IETF is at least TWICE as slow and the quality control iw just awful. [flame off] Cheers, - Ira McDonald High North Inc -----Original Message----- From: Markus Kuhn [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 11, 2003 5:31 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Linux console internationalization Beni Cherniavsky wrote on 2003-08-10 18:29 UTC: > Keld Simonsen wrote on 2003-08-10: > > If we stick to ISO 10646 then you need to generate the fully > > composed characters to get the characters. Of cause these characters > > are needed, you cannot leave witout them in most languages in the > > latin script. > > > Why? What does ISO 10646 lack that Unicode has? I thought they are > pretty much the same... Doesn't ISO 10646 define combining > characters? ISO 10646 lacks much of the useful information, guidelines, databases, technical reports, and subsetting information that the Unicode Standard provides. ISO 10646 mentions briefly three implementation levels, which look not too useful in practice and appear a bit like they have been put in on short notice to shut up someone in the committee who wasn't happy with combining characters. ISO has become a bit of a religious cult for some. The hurdles ISO puts up for the creation, review, acceptance and dissemination of standards do little to increase the quality of the resulting specifications. As a result, the vast majority of information technology standardization is done today outside the slow and restrictive ISO/IEC framework. Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__ -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/ -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
