Re: Unicode, Cure-all or Kill-all?

From: Alain LaBont/e'/ (
Date: Sat Aug 10 1996 - 16:10:24 EDT

At 00:45 1996-8-10 -0700, Jonathan wrote:

>A standard should be based on existing technology.
>People should not expect standards to solve technology problems. Standards
>should be aimed at standartisation problems, i.e. when several products
>implement similar technologies in incompatible ways.

I strongly disagree with this. I said in another forum that if everybody on
earth uses something, it is useless to standardize it.

Standards are not closed on themselves to solve themselves for themselves.
They are there to:

-solve commonly encountered problems;
-of which solutions are possible (that's not hard to prove even when there is
  no implementation that has been made commercially available)
-but either inexistent because too risky to be implemented by only one company
          (innovation risk to be beaten by competition even when you were the
- or multiple because it was urgent, thus creating a chaos;
-standards are intended to solve a chaos created by the law of jungle.

The trend is to solve problems in common of which no solution has been
commercially made available; this means that implementation must of course
be possible (and that's the reason it takes so much time to standardize, it
gives chaces to solve problems of all nature (technical, philosophical,
physical, political, etc.), to experiment, and so on). It should also show a
trend rather than lag behind. The industry (in particular the smallest) no
longer can afford to develop brand new solutions that cost a lot of money
but can't be got back because competition eats the innovators by tricks of
patenting a slightly different solution (and contributing to chaos).

Alain LaBonti
