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  • [OT] Standards (was Re: Simple string conversion from UCS2 to ISO8859-1

    From Janis Papanagnou@21:1/5 to David Brown on Wed Feb 26 07:38:06 2025
    On 25.02.2025 17:16, David Brown wrote:
    [...]

    The standard used by modems here is UCS2, not UTF-16. As you point out,
    this was all standardised in the early 1990's (before UTF-16) - as a standardisation of things that had already been used before that.

    And
    once a telecom standard is made, it is set in stone and never changed.

    This is (or should be) true for all _standards_; that's the point
    about standards, to be a reliable base.[*]

    In standards ("telecom standards" or else) there's also typically
    evolutions with versioning and/or also obsoleting/deprecating older
    versions or newer versions just superseding older ones, though.
    So the property "never changed" should be read accordingly.

    (Just saying, to not get a wrong impression about the "telecom
    standards", CCITT, ITU-T,[**] specifically, and other standards.)

    Janis

    [*] The colloquial terminology is sometimes quite fuzzy though; e.g.
    the *.doc format was often named "de facto standard", but there was
    a long period of time neither a public document of that "standard"
    nor was it a standard in the first place; the proprietary format
    changed silently while the extension (and folks calling the format
    a "standard") stayed.

    [**] As a drastic example of evolution consider X.509 for example;
    initially it was only (compared to later versions) a "handful" of
    pages (something like 25 vs. 250, IIRC).

    [...]

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From David Brown@21:1/5 to Janis Papanagnou on Wed Feb 26 09:52:28 2025
    On 26/02/2025 07:38, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
    On 25.02.2025 17:16, David Brown wrote:
    [...]

    The standard used by modems here is UCS2, not UTF-16. As you point out,
    this was all standardised in the early 1990's (before UTF-16) - as a
    standardisation of things that had already been used before that.

    And
    once a telecom standard is made, it is set in stone and never changed.

    This is (or should be) true for all _standards_; that's the point
    about standards, to be a reliable base.[*]

    Sure - although it is sometimes reasonable to make small corrections.


    In standards ("telecom standards" or else) there's also typically
    evolutions with versioning and/or also obsoleting/deprecating older
    versions or newer versions just superseding older ones, though.
    So the property "never changed" should be read accordingly.


    Yes, it is often a good idea to bring out new versions of standards, superseding old ones but leaving the old ones available. So while the
    SMS standards for 3G are fixed on UCS-2, perhaps the 4G or later
    standards have moved on. (I have not checked at all.)

    (Just saying, to not get a wrong impression about the "telecom
    standards", CCITT, ITU-T,[**] specifically, and other standards.)

    Janis

    [*] The colloquial terminology is sometimes quite fuzzy though; e.g.
    the *.doc format was often named "de facto standard", but there was
    a long period of time neither a public document of that "standard"
    nor was it a standard in the first place; the proprietary format
    changed silently while the extension (and folks calling the format
    a "standard") stayed.


    In that particular example, the colloquial use of the term "standard"
    was very far from the technical term! And even after Microsoft bribed
    and bullied their way into getting docx format ratified as an ISO
    standard, they never actually followed their own "standard" very closely
    in their own software.

    But as you note in the subject line change, that is getting a bit off-topic.

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