Subject: Unicode relationship to ISO standards

From: [email-masked] (Walt Daniels)
Date: 24 Jan 1991 16:36:08 EST

Really from:
From: Isai Scheinberg,    NLTC Toronto

Hello,

As a participant in both ISO SC2 and Unicode activities I will try
to respond to the comments by Mr. J. W. van Wingen in his note
on January 15, 1991.

There are number of consortiums and organizations in USA, Europe, Japan
and worldwide (some examples: X/Open, OSF, UI, TRON, Uniforum, ...)
which are working to develop de facto industry standards, particularly
in areas where no satisfactory international or national standards
exist. In area of coded character sets there is a growing need for a
2-BYTE multilingual code which will contain all commonly used characters
worldwide. No existing or planned ISO standard satisfies this need
(it was an original goal of the Base Multilingual Plane of ISO 10646, but
this objective was abandoned due to various reasons). Unicode consortium
was established to satisfy this objective.

To gain the benefit of the wide exposure before freezing Unicode 1.0
consortium decided to send the draft for public review to large number
of specialists and companies worldwide, including known experts from
national SC2 committees. For example, many members of Canadian SC2
expressed interest in Unicode and I asked Dr. Freytag (from Microsoft)
to send copies to these people. I assume that, similarly, copies were
sent to Mr. van Wingen and experts from Danish SC2, etc.. This is
in no way a request for formal position from CSA or NNI or attempt
to bypass ISO rules.

On the other hand, I fully agree with a view that de jure standards
are becoming increasingly important, especially in Europe, but also
in other countries, including NA. Therefore, it will greatly benefit
both users and vendors of Unicode applications if Unicode will gain
de jure status. There are several possibilities to achieve that:

  1) Submit New Work Item (NWI) proposal
  2) Submit Unicode for Fast-track procedure
  3) Integrate Unicode in the 10646

Although, the third option will require architectural changes in the DIS
10646 (especially removal of the C0/C1 restriction, which is supported
by a number of SC2 national bodies) it is the most desirable one, as it
will eliminate the potential mess of the two major INCOMPATIBLE
multilingual codes. Several proposals for integration were made during
the last ANSI X3L2 meeting and it is expected that efforts in this
direction will continue.

Best regards,
Isai Scheinberg

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