Re: [idn] Requirements I-D

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <Harald@Alvestrand.no>]

At 07:54 19.05.2000 -0700, Mark Davis wrote:
>I am curious as to the source of the reluctance to refer to the Unicode 
>Standard. After all, if everyone limited themselves to only ISO standards, 
>no reference could be made to ECMA standards, W3C standards, or even, for 
>that matter, Internet standards.
In relatively recent history, there have been cases where an organization, 
consortium or other "informal" standards organization has made standards, 
extensions to standards or variations of standards with the assumption that 
ISO would bless these.

In some cases, they did, and all was great.

In other cases, ISO comittees found real or perceived problems with the 
suggested standards, made incompatible changes, and standardized the result.
In some cases (Ethernet vs 802.2 Length field, I believe), the "market" 
chose the non-ISO version; in other cases (SDLC vs HDLC, for instance), 
they chose the ISO version.

A great pain and suffering was had by all.
We want to avoid that situation; one way to avoid it is by not referring to 
specs submitted to ISO until ISO has actually taken a position on them.

Note that the same logic applies to referring to non-final versions of ISO 
standards; long-time aficandoes of charset stuff may remember the effort to 
refer to what's now known as "ISO 10646 DIS-1" in the MIME specifications.
(briefly, a codepoint set and set of encoding methods that appeared final 
at the time, but got totally thrown away in the "unification with Unicode").

Note that AFAIK, none of the snafus mentioned above was caused by serious 
attempts to do damage to others; people argued for the outcome they thought 
best, some won, some lost, and the result just happened to include some 
consequences for the rest of us. That's life.

Yes, we're paranoid. That doesn't mean Murphy's not out to get us.

                    Harald A

--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, EDB Maxware, Norway
Harald.Alvestrand@edb.maxware.no