Re: French character names in gucharmap

[Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh gnu org>]

On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 22:00, Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:
> It is mostly political correctness. Unicode is an industry standard,
> with Microsoft as one of the main players. Unicode is dominated by some
> big US companies.

W3C is also dominated by big US companies. Does this mean we shouldn't
use (or name) HTML, XML, or CSS?

> On the other hand ISO is an open standards
> organization where people from small companies, and even from government
> and users can play a major role.

ISO is an *international* standards organization. International here
usually means inter-governmental. It's not open for everyone to
participate. You'll need the approval of your national standards body.
It's sometimes very very hard to get.

> ISO standards are international, and
> thus also valid in my country, while Unicode does not have any status.

This means that IETF and W3C also don't have any status in your country.
Does this make you prefer ISO HTML to W3C HTML?

> Gnome should (IMHO) as an open source movement propagate open standards
> whenever possible (over industry standards).

Please define open standards. We are not talking about IETF standards
here. ISO standards are not available for gratis. Unicode is at least
available for gratis at its web site.

I agree that open standards should be preferred, but we need good
definitions with examples. As far as one random developer is involved,
Unicode is more open than ISO/IEC 10646.

> And then anyway, it would be wrong to call it Unicode, as it is not in
> Unicode.

What is not in Unicode? Unicode data files fetched from
<http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/>? The project is about
translating those files. It will use the ISO/IEC 10646 French names that
is already available as a beginning.

> I do not know the full scope of what you are trying to do, but (as you
> know) ISO does have locale specifications that we try to use in Gnome
> (TR 14652) - these are aligned with Unicode, but there are some
> differences, such as character classes, which are aligned with POSIX and C.

Well, GNOME's glib already provides all the missing information in glib.
See:

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/glib/glib-Unicode-Manipulation.html

> What is included in the project?

Translations of Unicode character data to different languages.

> Are ISO 14651 and 14652 included?

No, 14651 and 14652 are not involved.

roozbeh