xml-dev - Re: Lotsa laughs

[Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>]

John Cowan wrote:
> 
> Chris Lilley wrote:
> 
> > ISO represents governments, not the international community at large.
> 
> More exactly, it represents national standards bodies, only some
> of which are governmental: ANSI, e.g., is a private U.S. nonprofit.

Right, but each government can only have one of them, is my point.

> > For example. Tibetan is a language, but was not added into ISO 10646
> > because Tibet is ruled by China.
> 
> Do you have evidence for this story?

Yes, sure - the Chinese NB didn't ask for Tibetan to be added, in the
sense that there was no Chinese national character set standard for
Tibetan, and the original 10646 was just a concatenation of existing
national standards, so anyone that wasn't an official "nation" got left
out. I was just picking that as an example, by the way, to illiustrate
the point by analogy about international representation; I don't have a
particular axe to grind here.

> IMHO Tibetan didn't make it into 10646:1993 because it's a hairy
> script, not because of Chinese interference. 

I didn't say they interfered; I said that they never asked for it and
there was no-one else to ask for it, either. Actually, the Irish NB
seems to fulfill that role rather nicely nowadays ;-)

--
Chris

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