Re: OT: ISO standards who?

["Christopher John Fynn" <cfynn gmx net>]

Keld

The ISO process may compare favourably to that of corporate consortiums such as
Unicode in some respects, but  it can cost small *countries* an awful lot to
join & participate in ISO. And, unless your country is a  member of ISO there
is no way of officially participating  in groups like JTC1/SC2/WG2, and your
country doesn't have a vote.

Then there are places like the UK which is a member of ISO but whose national
standards body decided to charge members of their character encoding comittee
for the privilege of doing voluntary work. Since there wern't enough comittee
members prepared to pay the rather large amount asked for, the UK comittee was
wound up - so the people in the UK can no longer participate in WG2.

I also notice that the Government of India, Ministry of Indormation Technology
and  the Government of Tamil Nadu Department of Information Technology are
members of the Unicode Consortium yet for some reason India, although a member
of ISO, doesn't participate in WG2. I don't know the reason for this but it has
always struck me as odd especially since there are so many Indic scripts in the
standard.

I really do think the whole text of ISO 10646  should be made freely avaiable
on line. I know national standards bodies partly fund themselves by selling
hard copies of ISO Standards - but since the printed Unicode Standard is widely
available and  the whole text is freely available on line there is virtually no
market for hard copies of ISO/IEC 10646.  Because ISO 10646 is not available on
line everyone refers to "Unicode".

Best wishes

- Chris


--
Christopher J. Fynn