[dsdl-discuss] ISO 15897: dead registry

Dear colleagues,

One issue in the 19757-7 FCD is whether or not ISO 15897 should be
added as a reference.

Hideki Hiura (a member of SC2 and Unicode Consortium Technical Committee)
opposed to the incorporation of 15897 in Kyoto. WG1 agreed. However, I
did not check N851. The FCD should have allowed 15897. My apologies.

However, Japan does intend to oppose to the incorporation of ISO/IEC
15897 very strongly. In fact, our comments on the FCD strongly requests
omission of 15897. Japan has been very against it for many years.

From the beginning, ISO 15897 is questionable. It began as
a fast-track submission of CEN ENV 12005. Silent majority approved,
while some countries (including Japan) disapproved. As a result,
it became a standard, but it was required that an amendment project
should start immediately. That amendment project achieved nothing.
Then, SC35 proposed to SC22 that SC35 should take over this project.
SC22 declined and cancelled it. After that, SC35 started another
project for 15897. I do not know its current status.

The registry of ISO 15897 has not been updated since November 2001.
I would argue that this is a dead registry.

The most important registries are the IANA charset registry and
the CDLR [3] of the Unicode consortium. The IANA charset registry
is maintained by IANA, while the CLDR registry is actively maintained
by the Unicode consortium, which includes key players. The CLDR registry
has already have more information than ISO 15897. In fact, POSIX Locale
information can be generated from the CLDR registry.

You might want to hear the opinion of Unicode, SC2, or SC22 experts
about this issue. As far as I know, sensible people agree to ignore
ISO 15897.

[1] http://std.dkuug.dk/cultreg/
[2] http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets
[3] http://www.unicode.org/cldr/repository_access.html

Cheers,

-- 
MURATA Makoto <murata@hokkaido.email.ne.jp>
--
DSDL members discussion list
To unsubscribe, please send a message with the
command  "unsubscribe" to dsdl-discuss-request@dsdl.org
(mailto:dsdl-discuss-request@dsdl.org?Subject=unsubscribe)