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(_at_)ccil(_dot_)org>
the corridors http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
during the hours of repose
in the boots of ascension. --Sign in Austrian ski-resort hotel