pne: A picture of a plush toy, halfway between a duck and a platypus, with a green body and a yellow bill and feet. (Default)
Philip Newton ([personal profile] pne) wrote2004-07-08 12:46 pm
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RIP ISO 8859?

A recent edit to the en Wikipedia article on ISO 8859 added this bit:

The ISO/IEC 8859 standard was maintained by ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 2, Working Group 3 (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 3). In June 2004, WG 3 disbanded, and maintenance duties were transferred to SC 2. The standard is not currently being updated, as the Subcommittee's only remaining Working Group, WG 2, is concentrating on development of ISO/IEC 10646.

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[identity profile] jordik.livejournal.com 2004-07-08 07:33 am (UTC)(link)
Good riddance...

Unicode baby yeah!
ext_78: A picture of a plush animal. It looks a bit like a cross between a duck and a platypus. (Default)

[identity profile] pne.livejournal.com 2004-07-08 08:23 am (UTC)(link)
In a world that's closer to ideal than this one is, yes.

(Said world would also include widespread support for language-specific glyph shaping, for starters, so we wouldn't have the Romanian mess.)

[identity profile] jordik.livejournal.com 2004-07-08 09:40 am (UTC)(link)
Oh yes.

Not that I hate 8859-x per sè (I did a lot of work on the various ISO-8859-x articles (I wrote most of them except the main ones), but the main reason I dislike it is the ASCIIcentricism they still propagate: Á (a acute) is "normal", but n (n acute) is "weird"?
ext_78: A picture of a plush animal. It looks a bit like a cross between a duck and a platypus. (Default)

ASCIIcentrism

[identity profile] pne.livejournal.com 2004-07-08 09:55 am (UTC)(link)
Not sure why you say that's ASCIIcentric?

ASCII treats 'a' and 'n' both the same (they're both there) and 'á' and 'ń' also both the same (they're both absent).

ISO-8859-1 has 'á' but not 'ń', while ISO-8859-2 has both. But I'm not sure why you think that's significant, since they serve different languages.
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