--On Monday, March 02, 2015 14:53 -0700 Peter Saint-Andre - &yet <[email protected]> wrote:
>... > I have heard back from the RFC Editor and they note that > several recent RFCs use this as a citation: > > [UNICODE] The Unicode Consortium, "The Unicode Standard", > <http://www.unicode.org/versions/latest/>. > > I think that works fine in most instances. The condition for its working fine is that we be confident that whatever text we are referring to be stable, at least in substance and to the extent to which we need it. IIR, formal stability rules apply to code tables, properties, and relationships, not sections of text, so it is hard to be confident about any very specific statements. If one does not have that confidence and does not have a high level of skill in predicting the future, one is probably better off referencing a version and making statements about likely stability, not using "latest". > I do have a question about how to handle pointers to > particular chapters, such as: > > using Unicode Default Case Folding as defined in > Chapter 3 > of the Unicode Standard [UNICODE] > > As John notes, chapter numbers might change. If we want to > provide a pointer to a particular chapter, we could modify > such text like so: > > using Unicode Default Case Folding as defined in the > Unicode > Standard [UNICODE] (at the time of this writing, the > algorithm > is specified in Chapter 3 of [UNICODE7.0]) That is more or less what I've done in other places. > However, I'm not sure if we really need to point to a > particular chapter in a particular version. With additional qualifications about being able to predict the future, if the need granularity is that of a Chapter, one might use the chapter name and let the reader find the TOC or Index in a particular version. At the risk of introducing an immediate counterexample to illustrate why one needs to be careful about this, TUS 5.0 has [...] 7 European Alphabetic Scripts 8 Middle Eastern Scripts 9 South Asian Scripts-1 10 South Asian Scripts-2 11 Southeast Asian Scripts [...] while TUS 7.0 has [...] 7 Europe-I: Modern and Liturgical Scripts 8 Europe-II: Ancient and Other Scripts 9 Middle East-I: Modern and Liturgical Scripts 10 Middle East-II Ancient Scripts 11 Cuneiform and Hieroglyphs 12 South and Central Asia-I: Official Scripts of India 13 South and Central Asia-II: Other Modern Scripts 14 South and Central Asia-III: Ancient Scripts 15 South and Central Asia-IV: Other Historic Scripts 16 Southeast Asia [...] These new category breakdowns are not just subdivisions of existing material with renumbering but required moving some material around. There are also some new chapters that have no obvious correspondence to chapters or parts of chapters in earlier versions. I won't try to guess at future Unicode plans, but note, for example, that the new Chapter 12 is unstable because shifting political tides in India have resulted in gradual increases in the number of official languages. john _______________________________________________ precis mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/precis
