Accessing the WG2 document register

Mon Jun 15 03:29:41 CDT 2015

 On Mon, Jun 15, 2015, William_J_G Overington  wrote:

 > I have been thinking about the current discussion in the Unicode mailing list about a particular ISO committee no longer being allowed to accept proposal documents from individuals, because of a rule change from a higher level within ISO.
> 
> I am thinking of how the committee meetings might be different from how they would be if the rules had not been changed and what might not get encoded that might have been encoded had the rule change not happened.
> 
> In the short term, the individual contributor is hurt, yet in the long term the document encoding process is hurt and the whole world of information technology may be hurt as potentially good content has been ignored due to discrimination, and a standards document produced that is not as good as it could have been had there not been the discrimination.

> ...
> I opine that it is important when deciding what will be considered for encoding that there is no discrimination about considering encoding proposals. Not only does ignoring contributions cause immediate problems but also there can be second order effects and so on as potential later contributions will not be made as they will not have the original contribution to build upon, and many people may not even realize that the second order effects have taken place.
>

I'm shocked that there is still any discrimination, even against individuals, in ISO, and worse, that such discrimination has been newly introduced.

This makes me remember the idea I got about ISO when I considered the ISO/IEC 9995 standard. This standard specifies that on all keyboards, there should be a so-called common secondary group, and that this secondary group should contain all the characters that are on the keyboard but aren't for a so-called strictly national use.  This sounds to me as if it were fascistic or neofascistic. The way this secondary group is accessed seems rather complicated and been engineered in disconnect from actual OSs and keyboard drivers. The result was that when it went on to be implemented on Windows, the secondary group was not accessed like specified but as Kana levels, which is very consistent with a real keyboard. But in the meantime, this ISO/IEC 9995 standard wastes a whole shift state by excluding it simply from use, on the pretext that you need to press more than two keys: Shift + AltGr + another key. This restriction to a maximum number of two simultaneously pressed keys was so fancy Microsoft didn't bother about. Really, to enter a character from the second level of the secondary group, you need to press Shift + Kana + another key.  That's all OK, but the ISO/IEC 9995 standard is *not*.

I won't repeat what I already wrote on this List. Sincerely I thought that the International Association for Standardization is today a real international organization which cares for all nations on the earth, whether the proposals come from individuals or collectivities. I dimly recall that in the nineties, ISO was even likely to refuse demands made by its own national members. Reports and results showed that it even dit not consult anybody of the nations it was encoding the characters of, except a few people who were not always reliable, ISO 8859-1 showed.

To read such things today makes me furious again. I personally wish that you, Mr Pandey, Mr West and Mr Overington, be fully heard at ISO and that *all* proposals are treated equally, fully, and successfully.

What are we going to do? What are you going to do? I repeat, I'm shocked, and I hate ISO again.

Best regards,

Marcel Schneider

> Message du 15/06/15 09:53
> De : "William_J_G Overington" 
> A : pandey at umich.edu, unicode at unicode.org, babelstone at gmail.com
> Copie à : 
> Objet : Re: Accessing the WG2 document register
> 
> I have been thinking about the current discussion in the Unicode mailing list about a particular ISO committee no longer being allowed to accept proposal documents from individuals, because of a rule change from a higher level within ISO.
> 
> I am thinking of how the committee meetings might be different from how they would be if the rules had not been changed and what might not get encoded that might have been encoded had the rule change not happened.
> 
> In the short term, the individual contributor is hurt, yet in the long term the document encoding process is hurt and the whole world of information technology may be hurt as potentially good content has been ignored due to discrimination, and a standards document produced that is not as good as it could have been had there not been the discrimination.
> 
> Thinking of this I remembered that some years ago, possibly on Channel 4 television news in the UK, there was an item about a lady who had that year won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I am trying to trace who it was and a particular work by her, thus far without success.
> 
> There was a work, either a poem or a narrative, about what happened differently at a railway station because she was not there as a passenger that day, as to how what happened was different from what would have happened had she been there.
> 
> I cannot be sure but I think that Hungary came into it somewhere, either as a Hungarian lady or a Hungarian railway station.
> 
> I opine that it is important when deciding what will be considered for encoding that there is no discrimination about considering encoding proposals. Not only does ignoring contributions cause immediate problems but also there can be second order effects and so on as potential later contributions will not be made as they will not have the original contribution to build upon, and many people may not even realize that the second order effects have taken place.
> 
> William Overington
> 
> 15 June 2015
> 
> 
> 
> ----Original message----
> From : pandey at umich.edu
> Date : 10/06/2015 - 11:01 (GMTST)
> To : babelstone at gmail.com
> Cc : unicore at unicode.org, unicode at unicode.org
> Subject : Re: Accessing the WG2 document register
> 
> Andrew,
> 
> Thank you for this detailed investigation. It is truly informative.
> 
> As I am considered an ineligible contributor by ISO, um, standards, I hereby withdraw all of my contributions to Unicode, and reflexively to ISO 10646. A list of the contributions that I withdraw is given at:
> 
> http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~pandey/
> 
> Whoever has the task of coordinating with ISO, is that you Michel?, please withdraw all of my contributions.
> 
> All the best,
> Anshuman
> 
> 
> 
>
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