Contents
Eesti

1. Introduction

Six years have passed since the previous standard EVS 8:1993 "REQUIREMENTS ON INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN ESTONIAN LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT" was written. Since then, significant developments have taken place in the fields of IT covered by this standard. The new basic code table ISO 8859-15 will significantly improve communication between Estonia and European countries. The integration of Estonia into the European economic structures also implies that the symbol for common European currency or Euro must be easily accessible. Fair amount of new terminology has been accepted by the general users. The internationalization and localization requirements are well understood and given high priority by the software producers. This new edition will also try to correct some of the minor flaws of the previous version.

ISO 10646 or Unicode is gaining wider support as most applications base their solutions on this standard. A new part of the EVS 8 proves that this approach is needed. Single-byte coded character sets are ineffective and insufficient means to write and display, store and transmit the Latin character repertoire used in Estonia. As single-byte character tables will still remain in use, there is also a need to describe not only the characters in a language's alphabet but also the fallbacks that must be applied when the characters must be used in a more restricted environment.

The solutions of this standard are based on international standards--ISO new coded character set 8859-15, CEN project MES, POSIX, national language support means of IBM and Microsoft etc. For character encoding, Unicode is the preferred solution and the use of single-byte character sets should be avoided.

Like Estonia, the other Scandinavian countries have grouped the requirements for information technology in a cultural environment in a single document -- "Nordic Cultural Requirements on Information Technology". This description of language and cultural needs has evolved into ISO/IEC standards ISO/IEC 14652 and ISO/IEC 15897 which in turn form the base of this new edition of EVS 8.

At the time this standard was accepted, the formal means of describing the language and cultural conventions had not reached the final form. The information for all categories is presented in an alternative form -- as a narrative cultural specification (part 6 of this standard) and Appendix B of this standard is not normative.

The cultural conventions presented in this standard will be registered in the ISO/IEC 15897 cultural registry. Therefore, it is possible that the information presented in part 6 and Appendix B of this standard are superseded by the version in cultural registry but not yet officially in a re-edition of EVS 8. All applications should use the most recent version.

This version of EVS 8 cancels and replaces standard EVS 8:1993. This standard is referenced as EVS 8:2000.

The following normative documents or drafts were used in preparing EVS 8:2000: