[MPEG-OTSPEC] Proposal to discontinue the AdHoc Group

[John Hudson]

On 22092020 5:25 pm, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> 3. Many of us experts outside Apple/Adobe/Microsoft will join SC29 
> through our national bodies 

Or not.

While there are clearly untenable problems with the AHG, it has, in all 
its better moments, functioned as a buffer between individuals who just 
want to discuss and collaborate on font technology and the ISO 
bureaucracy. And Vlad, in all his better moments, has done a good job of 
managing that buffer in a way that means I don't have to deal directly 
with the frustrations of processes that are stuck in the late 20th Century.

There are good reasons why most of us involved in text encoding opt to 
work through Unicode channels rather than through our national standards 
bodies and the ISO 10646 process. These reasons are both procedural and 
also reflected in those aspects of the Unicode Standard that are extra 
to the part shared with ISO 10646.

Likewise, for my part, I am interested in free discussion and open 
collaboration, and primarily with those parts of text display and layout 
standardisation that are extra to the font format, e.g. shaping 
consistency, well-defined and testable outcomes for OTL, new tooling, 
etc.. That is why I welcome the new W3C initiative as providing a 
framework in which to identify projects on which to collaborate and 
appropriate channels through which to collaborate. And, yes, OFF is very 
likely to be at the end of one or more of those channels, but I still 
want a buffer between the collaboration and the ISO process: just a 
better one than this AHG. And my inclination, based on all the 
discussions here and in the issues git repo, is that the collaboration 
part needs to be moved /further/ away from ISO, not closer. It needs to 
be entirely separate and self-governing, with its own procedures and 
tools for communication, collaborative editing, versioning, etc., and 
only after it has completed its work on specific issues should it 
submit, through national standards bodies, proposals to OFF. If Behdad 
and others want to get involved in their national standards bodies and 
use that engagement to help get the proposals resulting from 
collaboration into the standard, that's great, but the collaboration 
itself should be taking place elsewhere.

JH


-- 

John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks Ltd    www.tiro.com
Salish Sea, BC        tiro at tiro.com

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