Related link: http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/
The thing that make internationalization (I18n) work fun is not the geeky pleasures of crazy written characters, but the kindness and co-operativeness of the human characters
(i18nista = i22a? i6a?). The same people crop up wearing different hats: there is considerable overlap between the ISO 10646 people and the Unicode people, overlap between the IETF and the W3C people, and so on. It is easy to be co-operative when you have the same people swapping hats.
This week it has been really nice to see two efforts of W3C's Martin Dürst advance to the next stage.
First, the loooooong coming
Character Model for the WWW 1.0: Fundamentals
plopped out the end of the ISO W3C voting factory.
It should be required reading for all programmers
and IT or computing students.
My SPREAD entities get a reference, which is nice
of the editors.
Second, ISO SC34 have adopted Martin's Hulls and Kernels approach as the basis of ISO DSDL (Document Schema Definiton Languages) Part 7 Character Repertoire Validation Language (CRVL), edited by RELAX NG's Murata Makoto. It is just being fed into the ISO voting factory: the Committee Draft is out this week, and it is currently being balloted for adoption as part of same International Standard as RELAX NG and (Real Soon Now!) Schematron. Hulls and Kernels is a simple idea that languished at W3C as a note.
CRVL will be useful for publishers and people dealing with serious non-ASCII data. W3C is not really a good home for publishing standards: they concerned with WWW things only. (Well, except for RDF, DOM and XQuery, which really have little to do with sending data over the web and everything to do with acessing data on a server.) Of course, W3C should be the better place than ISO for web standards too; no reflection on either organization. But, again, even with ISO and W3C the character world has overlap: the latest draft update to the ISO standard entity sets for mathematics is co-edited by W3C MathML's David Carlisle and ISO DSDL's Martin Bryan.
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However
However, Martin is >leaving W3C and I am sure everyone who knows him wishes him well. Because of the nature of things, the hundreds of millions of people whose lives will be improved because of better web internationalization will never know of his hard work, nor that of Misha Wolf, Gavin Nicols and the other leading lights.
Clarification
Someone wrote to me asking me whether I was announcing that Martin had left W3C for ISO. I was not saying that at all!: just that his W3C note had been adopted by ISO WG8, and that this was yet another example of the friendly (bordering on incestuous) relations between i18n standards bodies. (I did have a typo putting ISO instead of W3C which is now corrected, that probably didn't help things.)
Even outside the sunshine and frolicing of i18n, and in the profit-crazed world of schemas, combatants are not necessarily antagonists.