Re: UTF-8 revision

[John C Klensin <klensin@mci.net>]

On Sun, 31 Aug 1997 12:42:27 -0700 (PDT) Ned Freed 
<Ned.Freed@innosoft.com> wrote:
>...
> (2) I think you're going to have a significant problem getting this through
>     the IETF process unless you take a stand on what happens should the
>     character assignments in some future Unicode version change in an
>     incompatible way. Yes, I know that promises have been made that this will
>     never happen again, but that's all they are: Promises. The IETF has a
>     policy that it must retain change control over its own standards, and
>     this is a case where someone else effectively has change control over
>     the actual technical core of this specification. I therefore think that
>     this specification needs to say that it aligns automatically with
>     all future versions of Unicode that don't make incompatible changes, but
>     the minute one is made it stays aligned with the old version until and
>     unless the IETF specifically decides otherwise.

Ned,

While I think that "aligns with future versions of 10646" might 
be acceptable (and even there I see problems, as I don't know 
how to organize a flag day), aligning with future versions of 
Unicode is problematic as I don't think the Unicode consortium 
meets the informal IETF criteria for openness and due process 
that might lead us to partially hand over change control (even 
at that, it would be largely unprecedented). The history has 
been that we reference a particular version of some external 
document and, if the external document changes, we have to 
explicitly go through a new document, review, and last call 
process to change the normative reference.

   john