----- Original Message ----- From: "John R Levine" <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2018 2:37 PM > On Thu, 31 May 2018, Patrik Fältström wrote: > > The serious question here is if IETF do have enough competence in I18N space or if IETF should drop that ball and give to some other SDO. > > But the related question is whether any other SDO is any better. > > I18N needs an unusual combination of computer and linguistic skills. I > would be surprised if there were a lot of any people anywhere who have > them both. John, I have always seen the centre of gravity of i18n as firmly in Europe. I recall the struggles 40 years ago to persuade American organisations to take it seriously; I have always seen ASCII as an American response to the issue. Most of what I have learnt since comes from people who appear, from their affiliation, to be centred in Europe so I am not surprised that i18n efforts in the IETF do not reach as satisfactory a conclusion as some other work since the IETF has long had a closer connection with North America than other regions of the world. So where should the work take place? In a Europe-centric organisation, perhaps the EU (who put a lot of effort into some fields of IT), the ITU (which after all does recognise languages other than American in its work) or some such; and then there is Unicode which represents a certain competence in this area:-) I have wondered if the focus for this work would shift to the CJK parts of the world, as they became more engaged in mainstream IT, since European code page issues seem trivial compared to those of CJK, but I have not detected any such movement; Europe still seems to be the most concerned with this issue and so most likely to put effort into progress. Tom Petch > > Regards, > John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxxx, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY > Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
