Re: French character names in gucharmap

[Keld Jørn Simonsen <keld dkuug dk>]

On Fri, Dec 19, 2003 at 10:32:45PM +0330, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 22:00, Keld J??rn 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?

Yes, W3C is also an organization where grassrooters like us do not have
much chance of influence. HTML and XML are also ISO standards, so
it is OK to use these. Anyway we need to be practical, and W3C is very
hard to avoid, as is Unicode. They do a lot of good work, but one of
their objectives seems to be to keep grassrooters out of the decisions.
I think we should even use Microsoft specs
if it would help our users, but we should know that we are about to
shoot ourselves in our own foot, and by promoting non-open standards, we
are setting ourselves out of influence.

> > 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.

In most industrialized countries all companies are allowed to go to the 
standards commitees. I think the standards organizations are obliged to 
allow all companies. At least in the USA there are anti-monopoly laws
that says that everybody should be allowed to participate in forming a
standards specification; if not, it is considered an oligopoly and
that is illegal.

I understand that in some countries this is not so, and it is hard to
get into the work there. I feel (but am not sure) that these countries
are amongst them that have a real hard time getting heard at all on the
international scene anyhow.

> > 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?

Yes, in DKUUG we prefer ISO 15445 HTML to W3C html, and we are preaching
that to the parliament and the government. And it seems like they are
listening.

> > 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.

We are also talking about IETF standards as open standards.
Open standards are publically available specifications defined by a
standardization organisation with an open process.

> 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.

I can see that some developers have better input access to Unicode than
to ISO SC2. You must understand that the Unicode people are also in
charge of ISO SC2, and they are not always promoting ISO.

> > 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 see, you just see the french names as translations of the Unicode
names.
> 
> > 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.

OK, I see. But maybe they are already covered in glibc anyhow.
And what you like is translated info on the characters that indeed the
Unicode database is the best reference for.

Best regards
keld