SC22/WG20 N599

Draft

Liaison between the Unicode Consortium and SC22/WG20
Statement of mutual benefits

September 16, 1998

Internationalization efforts do not occur in isolation. Almost every standard has an international aspect. One set of such standards are those for coded character sets.

The character sets of the world rarely apply to a single language, and are often used in more than one country. All coded character set development has an international aspect, but this has increased in the last decade.

The industry requirements for a character set to serve the global market-place has been satisfied by ISO/IEC 10646, which is code-point equivalent to the Unicode Standard. The member representatives of the Unicode Consortium are an industry expert resource for the implementation of the world's languages and the scripts used to write them.

The Unicode Standard specifies not only the coding of characters, but also their properties and many other aspects of their use in implementations. The Unicode Consortium also develops algorithms and gives advice regarding culturally-dependent processing areas such a bi-directional text layout and the ordering of strings. These are main parts of the scope of SC22/WG20. SC22/WG20 would benefit from having a clear liaison line from the Unicode Consortium that would assist in the communication of developments by the Unicode Consortium that have a bearing on the work of SC22/WG20.

Conversely, SC22/WG20 develops international standards regarding internationalization. Since the Unicode Consortium has a clear interest in such standards, it would benefit by having a liaison line from SC22/WG20 reporting on the progress in such standards development.

Approved: SC22/WG20

Approved: Unicode Consortium