2011/8/31 Doug Ewell <[email protected]>: > Sorry for the non-Unicode digression.
This is not so much out of topic, given that the Unicode standard makes normative references to the ISO 639 standard (and a few others), and the UTC has also published, as part of its policies, statements of its position about the openness of these standards (namely, ISO standards for the idenfification or languages, geographic areas, and currencies). I would probably add to the list the ISO standard related to date formats, collation, identification of scripts (whose the Unicode Consortium is hosting the registry), and probably a few others that may be needed for the CLDR project. And may be in some future, some QA standards (part of the ISO 9000 series?) needed as worldwide and interoperable set of best practices (including for the normalization process itself), which may look too much administrative for now, but that may often be automated, in order to reduce development and maintenance costs, or to avoid some errors (most of them due to omissions and lack of a formal and permanent open survey of all possible uses). For such thing, these standards may help communicating with users that have less technical backgrounds, because it can be suported by tools providing some QA tests to disambiguate the communications and make them more precise, and to make problems and solutions easier to sort or to schedule for their resolutions or integration). -- Philippe.
