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ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34
Document Description and Processing Languages
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 N 92
DATE: 1999-08-19
REPLACES
DOC TYPE:
Liaison Organization Contribution
TITLE:
Final Liaison Statement form AFII Concerning ISO/IEC 10036
SOURCE:
A. Freytag, President, AFII
PROJECT:
STATUS:
For review and discussion at the 29 November - 3 December JTC 1/SC 34
Meeting in Philadelphia. This item will be placed on the draft agenda
for this meeting.
ACTION ID: ACT
DUE DATE:
DISTRIBUTION: P and L Members
SC Chairman
WG Conveners and Secretariats
MEDIUM: E
DISKETTE NO.:
NO. OF PAGES: 2
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, American National Standards Institute, 11 West
42nd Street, New York, NY 10036, Tel: +1 212 642 4976, Fax: +1 212
840 2298, Email: mtopping@ansi.org
SC 34 N 92
Final AFII Liaison Statement Concerning ISO/IEC 10036
Final notice: AFII will dissolve 8/31/99.
I notice that the ISO web site still clings to AFII as the registration authority.
After having received zero (0) registration requests over the last two years, and less than two (2) requests for copies of the glyph registry per year, it is AFII's parting recommendation that ISO/IEC 10036 be withdrawn for not meeting any detectable market need.
In that context it is important to mention that one very influential supplier of fonts who used to use glyph registry information to index glyphs has since abandoned the glyph registry in favor of a different scheme.
From Unicode 2.1 to Unicode 3.0, about 12,000 characters were added to the Unicode Standard (that set is equivalent to the combined AMD 8-31 for ISO/IEC 10646-1 developed since 1995). To date no party has shown any interest or willingness to fund the registration effort for the reference glyphs for these characters, let alone the glyphs for multiple shapes and or ligatures of same.
AFII used to fund the registration of the glyphs for the initial 36,000 characters of ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 from membership fees. The dwindling of its membership and the resulting dissolution of AFII is another indication of the lack of market relevance of the registration effort.
Without a trade organization to fund the registration of the large new repertoire, which will be supported by many vendors, one vendor would have to pay the cost for the benefit of all others. This is highly unlikely, and it is telling that the very last registration request received by AFII (almost three years ago) was from a government organization: The European Commission's request to register the euro.
Taken together these facts and trends confirm AFII's recommendation to SC34
and JTC1 to withdraw the standard.
Asmus Freytag
President
AFII