Paul Hoffman scripsit:
> If you believe that ECMA-404 will change in the future, that
> would indicate that ECMA might break interoperability with current
> implementations, even for what they perceive as "good reasons". In
> general, the IETF tries not to have its long-lived standards normatively
> latch on to moving targets for this very reason. Even when other SDOs
> have assured us that they will not make backwards-incompatible changes,
> they have done so anyway (cue the Klensin-esqe theme music...), and
> that has caused serious interoperability problems for the IETF specs.
Binding specifically to the first edition of ECMA-404 would resolve
that problem. Binding to a specific edition doesn't work so well with
Unicode, but that is because Unicode is a special case: it expands its
coverage in successive editions to ever-larger portions of the world
of writing systems. It would have been impossible to do the whole
thing at once, unlike even the largest ordinary technical standard.
ECMA-404 is not in that league.
--
Not to perambulate John Cowan <cowan@xxxxxxxx>
the corridors http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
during the hours of repose
in the boots of ascension. --Sign in Austrian ski-resort hotel