Thursday, December 23, 2010

About standards

I blogged about collation and standards and, there has been quite some follow up. The most valuable result is an expressed wish to append the CLDR standard with information about Assamese. This is to be tempered with the observation that adding to the CLDR is a painful process. Information new to me is that collation for Indic languages has been added to GNU/C for Tamil and Malayalam and, that an unsuccessful attempt was made to update the CLDR standard.


The sad truth is that it is not always easy to have changes applied to standards. This has benefits and drawbacks. As standards organisations take their time, the result is likely to be of a high quality and it is definitely true that it is easier for known persons and organisations to get results. With a collation order described in a standard, the information necessary to implement collation is available to everyone. It has the added bonus that everyone can be asked to comply with the standard.

The lack of formalised information about a language is the key factor that inhibits a language on the Internet. Asking for the implementation of such rules can only follow.
Thanks,
     GerardM

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