I just see the WG2 as a subcomity where governements may just check their practices and make minimum recommendations. Most governements are in fact very late to adopt the industry standards that evolve fast, and they just want to reduce the frequency of necessary changes jsut to enterinate what seems to be stable enough and gives them long enough period to plan the transitions. So ISO 10646 has had in fact very few updates compared to Unicode (even if these Unicode changes were "synchronized", most of them remained for long within optional amendments that are then synchronized in ISO 10646 long after the inbdustry has started working on updating their code for Unicode and made checks to ensure that it is stable enough to be finally included in ISO 10646 later as the new minimal platform that governments can reasonnably ask to be provided by their providers in the industry at reasonnable (or no) additional cost. So I see now ISO 646 only as a small subset of the Unicode standard. The WG2 technical comity is jsut there to finally approve what can be endorsed as a standard whose usage is made mandatory in governments, when the UTS itself is still (and will remain) just optional (not a requirement). It takes months or years to have new TUS features being available on all platforms that governements use. WG2 probably does not focus really on technical merits, but just evaluating the implementation and deployment costs, and that's where the WG2 members decide what is reasonnable for them to adopt (let's also not forget that ISO standards are mapped to national standards that reference it normatively, and these national standards (or European standards in the EEA) are legal requirements: governements then no longer need to specify each time which requirement they want, they're just saying that the national standards within a certain class are required for all product/service offers, and failure to implement theses standards will require those providers to fix their products at no additional cost, and independantly of the contractual or subscribed period of support).
2018-06-08 23:28 GMT+02:00 Marcel Schneider via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org >: > On Fri, 8 Jun 2018 13:33:20 -0700, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote: > > > […] > > There's no value added in creating "mirrors" of something that is > successfully being developed and maintained under a different umbrella. > > Wouldn’t the same be true for ISO/IEC 10646? It has no value added > neither, and WG2 meetings could be merged with UTC meetings. > Unicode maintains the entire chain, from the roadmap to the production > tool (that the Consortium ordered without paying a full license). > > But the case is about part of the people who are eager to maintain an > alternate forum, whereas the industry (i.e. the main users of the data) > are interested in fast‐tracking character batches, and thus tend to > shortcut the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC2 WG2. This is proof enough that applying > the same logic than to ISO/IEC 15897, WG2 would be eliminated. The reason > why it was not, is that Unicode was weaker and needed support > from ISO/IEC to gain enough traction, despite the then‐ISO/IEC 10646 being > useless in practice, as it pursued an unrealistic encoding scheme. > To overcome this, somebody in ISO started actively campaigning for the > Unicode encoding model, encountering fierce resistance from fellow > ISO people until he succeeded in teaching them real‐life computing. He had > already invented and standardized the sorting method later used > to create UCA and ISO/IEC 14651. I don’t believe that today everybody > forgot about him. > > Marcel > >