Re: RE: comments on draft-yergeau-utf8-rev2-00

[Kenneth Whistler <kenw@sybase.com>]

Harald,

> please don't remove the book reference.

I think François came up with a suitable compromise, which
matches the way the Unicode Consortium recommends that a version
of the Unicode Standard be referenced.

> if Stuff Happens and the Unicode Consortium goes away, any decent library 
> will be able to find its copy of the book by ISDN number (unless QUITE 
> severe breakdowns in civilization happen....)

Well yes, but they won't be able to find Unicode 3.2 that way, since
it is a web publication.

By the way, I have always been the conservative one in the UTC and
the editorial committee, pointing out all along the hidden gotchas in
trying to publish standards online, including both the problem of
stability of reference and the problem of defining the actual extent
of the normative document once you start putting hyperlinks into the
text. But I keep getting gradually beat back by people who insist that
web publication is the world of the future, and who would just as soon
commit the entire standard to an online-only existence, or close to it.

> The URL, however, is likely to not resolve once that happens, and we don't 
> have any means of finding out what it pointed to once it has gone away.

True enough. But I would think you would have at list a *little*
assurance that the Unicode Consortium is around yet for the long haul,
and that even is "Stuff Happens", the importance of the standard is
such that people would make arrangements for continuation of the core
reference material online, even if the UTC and the Unicode Consortium
shut down.

Perhaps, however, the Unicode Consortium should wonder the same thing
about the IETF, since all those RFC's are also just online documents --
and I am not going to find them by ISDN numbers in my reference
library either. ;-)

Incidentally, we are only about a year and a half out from the publication
of Unicode 4.0, which will be another *book* with an ISDN the libraries
can put on shelves and look up in their catalogs. I think it is a reasonable
bet that the Unicode Consortium will last long enough to make that
milestone, at least.

> The RFC Editor has seen this happen so many times already that the 
> resistance to URLs as only references to normative material is quite solid.

--Ken