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With no standard ways of plugging input methods into Linux desktops, trying to develop one used to be difficult. No more — now there is an actual standard to address this small but important part of Linux, especially for East Asian users.

Last week, I was in Beijing to chair the Input Method Sub-Working Group meeting for the 13th time over the past three years. The IMSWG is part of the larger Northeast Asia OSS Promotion Forum (NEAOSS), formed by the Chinese, Japanese and Korean governments for pushing open source software.

Over the past few years, every detail of how input methods should work were discussed and debated among participants from the three countries. All had strong opinions on the architecture of the system, and at times it seemed impossible for them to agree on the specification.

We solved that by getting them to write software code instead — being programmers, we found they understood each other better in computer languages than in English.

Now, not only do we have an agreed specification, but we are also developing a reference implementation, IMBus, thanks to the hard work of all involved, which includes James Su of SCIM fame, and Hideki Hiura, the designer of XIM and IIIMF. James gave a nice talk about IMBus at last year’s LF Desktop Architects Meeting.

I said “nearly” because the overhead of being a semi-government entity means the specification won’t be published until later this year. But all technical issues have been dealt with. With hope, this specification will work its way up to ISO and published as an ISO standard in future. ISO being ISO, this won’t happen anytime soon — I’ll talk more about that later.

Update: this post now also up on the Outblaze blog.