(unknown charset) Re: registration of a new charset: iso-8859-15

A 10:32 98-03-24 -0800, Erik van der Poel a écrit :
>Hello Marc,
>
>I have a couple of comments/questions:
>
>IANA charsets are case-insensitive. Therefore, "ISO-8859-15" and
"iso-8859-15" are
>the same. I would suggest deleting the alias "iso-8859-15" and putting the
"preferred
>MIME name" next to the "ISO-8859-15".
>
>The ISO-IR-203 number is for the "ISO International Register of Coded
Character Sets
>To Be Used With Escape Sequences", right? Have you actually received the
paper update
>via regular (snail) mail? Has anybody else received the update, and can
you confirm
>that the number is indeed 203? I have not received my copy of the update yet.

[Alain] :
Right, I annex the document in PDF format, as handled to/by the SC2
secretariat in Japan. It will be sent for a 4-month comment period. However
nobody can stop it, one can only comment in case there would be real mistakes.

[Erik] :
>What is the status of ISO-8859-15 in ISO itself? Is it still a draft, or
has it
>become a full standard? What is the date on the front page?

[Alain] :
It is now to be submitted for FDIS ballot after the SC2 PLenary ending this
week (time to triple-check typos as this is final text)... i.e the ultimate
stage after Draft International Standard according to the new ISO and JTC1
procedures (in ISO there are now DIS and FDIS, in JTC1 only
FDIS-2-month-ballot, except for fast-tracking DIS in a 6-month ballot,
which is not the case here). At this stage no technical change will ever be
allowed. There will be a *2-month* letter ballot to ask voting national
standards bodies if the standard is suitable for publishing as an
international standard by July 1998.

So if one wants to play maximum prudence, adoption will be undebatable by
July. It is a formality and it is always possible that it does not make it
but given the count of votes now (81%), it has now gone beyond the 75%
approval rate required for publishing an international standard. It would
be surprising to see that percentage go down, it never ceased to go up
since last July... that is however very theoretically possible, as unlikely
as it might look.

CEN is *urgently* asking for such a standard, for support of the EURO SIGN,
and 17 countries voted in favour, 4 against and 1 abstention. And so far
there is no standard alternative project for the 8-bit world for coding the
EURO SIGN, and all this has been requested explicitly and insistantly by
CEN on behalf of the European Community.

[Erik] :
>The reason I ask is because there has been a case in the past where ECMA
registered
>one of their standards to get an ISO-IR-NNN number, but ISO itself made
one or more
>changes after that date, before it reached the final ISO standard stage.

[Alain] :
Your question is excellent and thanks for asking.

The only change allowed at this stage for Latin 9 would be no publishing.

The ISO provisional registration has been done on site in Seattle during
the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2 meeting. Contrarily to a standard, even if the
standard were not published (which is very hypothetical), nobody can oppose
a registration in the ISO character set registry. An individual can make a
registration. In our particular case 4 national bodies are sponsors:
Canada, Finland, France and Ireland.

[Erik] :
>I believe the "csISOLatin15" should be "csISOLatin9" to be consistent with
the
>existing registrations for ISO-8859-9 and ISO-8859-10. You already have an
alias
>"latin9". This comes from the ISO spec itself, right? Does it say "Latin
alphabet No.
>9"?

[Alain] :
This is now undebatable, two countries requested the change in numering
scheme from 0 to 9 and we did it. So this is absolutely right.

[Erik] :
>Erik van der Poel
>
>Marc Blanchet wrote:
>
>>         this is a request to register iso-8859-15 as a character set. It
is a new
>> charset derived from latin1 enabling full french and finnish support and
>> the Euro sign. It has been registered today at ISO under application ISO-IR
>> 203.
>>
>> Name: ISO-8859-15
>> Alias: iso-ir-203
>> Alias: iso-8859-15 (preferred MIME name)
>> Alias: latin9
>> Alias: latin0
>> Alias: csISOLatin15
>>
>> It has been known to the community as latin0, which is the reason for this
>> alias.

[Alain] :
This is right also, one can't change history. But it only has value of
nickname. We don't have to officially stick to it... it was good for
publicity though... it is more known under the name Latin 0 than Latin 9.

Alain LaBonté
Seattle