Reference to ISO/IEC 10646 in HTML 4.0 Specification

Ian, Dave, Arnaud,

At the last I18N WG F2F Meeting, a problem of the reference to ISO/IEC
10646 in HTML 4.0 Specification was discussed.  In the "Normative
references" section [1], it says:

   [ISO10646]
          "Information Technology -- Universal Multiple-Octet Coded
          Character Set (UCS) -- Part 1: Architecture and Basic
          Multilingual Plane", ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993. The current
          specification also takes into consideration the first five
          amendments to ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993.

But this is ambiguous and misleading.  I believe the "real" intention is 
expressed in the following note found at "SGML Declaration of HTML 4.0"
section [2]:

   Note. Strictly speaking, ISO Registration Number 177 refers to the
   original state of [ISO10646] in 1993, while in this specification, we
   always refer to the most up-to-date form of ISO 10646. Changes since
   1993 have been the addition of characters and a one-time operation
   reallocating a large number of codepoints for Korean Hangul (Amendment
   5).

As far as I know, there are already 19 amendments to ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993
as of 1998-09-12 [3].  So just referring to the first five amendments
seems not appropriate, e.g. we have already included € (U+20AC) in
HTML 4.0, which is not included in the original 10646-1:1993 nor the
first five amendments.

I discussed with WG members who are also involved in ISO, and the reference
something like the following seems appropriate and enough.

   [ISO10646]
          "Information Technology -- Universal Multiple-Octet Coded
          Character Set (UCS) -- Part 1: Architecture and Basic
          Multilingual Plane", ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993, and its amendments.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/references.html#h-1.1
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/sgmldecl.html 
[3] http://www.iso.ch/cate/d18741.html

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Friday, 18 September 1998 12:10:51 UTC