Re: Normalisation and matching

Paul, Adam, Dan,
may I may just give a papyweb suggestion?

all this reminds me the disputes at the begining of the Minitel story with 
different manufactirers (the character set was hardcoded). There was no 
agreement so the different equipments came with some different 
character/graphical support (somewhat the same as IE, Netscape, Opera) not 
satisfying us (Tymnet International) as this being in addition to French 
(one format and character set oriented). This winded up to a developper 
common agreement to support what was in common and not to use what was not 
compatible. And for some big orderers to drop orders (we had ordered 
150.000 "Scansets" for US market tests and stopped buying at 40.000) to 
force the features everyone wanted.

After that we tried to understand if we could have saved a lot of time 
(probably 2 years and a lot of money) not delaying web like application by 
8 or 10 years (we had most of the proposition ready and the hypertext 
father with us). The review shown that everyone had well documented 
their  positions in front of the CNET (FT Labs) and that what we should 
have done was to have worked on the specifications _together_.

Why not Dan and Adam (and may be you) to try to work _together_ a possible 
alternative draft? So there is no opposition but an attempt to an 
alternative joint proposition? I am not good enough at what Dan says to 
judge but I feel he sounds right and Adam also seems to have moved in a lot 
of good directions. Everyone would be very glad if you could come with a 
joint draft (that is, as long as it supports case-sensitiveness at least as 
an option).

I am sure it would also help a lot, any plans towards an RHS consistent 
evolution since what everyone want is an unique consistent vernacular 
system we can use everywhere to address and sort in databases and 
dictionnaries, in taking cases into consideration or not at will.

jfc

PS. vernacular:

- standard native language of a country or locality.
- everyday language spoken by a people as distinguished from the literary 
language.
- variety of such everyday language specific to a social group or region: 
the vernaculars of New York City.
- idiom of a particular trade or profession: in the legal vernacular.
- idiomatic word, phrase, or expression.
- common, nonscientific name of a plant or animal.

I accept it in its scripting approach which is indeed sometimes very 
innovative too.



At 19:16 15/08/03, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
>Dan, I'm going to say the same thing to you here that I said in the IDN 
>WG: write an Internet Draft so people can see what you are talking about. 
>Just repeatedly saying on a mailing list "I want UTF-8" is not sufficient 
>for people to compare the positive and negative aspects of your proposal. 
>Until you write something that can be compared to the IMAA document, this 
>thread (a conversation between you and Adam, really) is useless.
>
>--Paul Hoffman, Director
>--Internet Mail Consortium
>
>
>
>
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