Re: charset aliases

[Keld Jørn Simonsen <keld@dkuug.dk>]

On Mon, Apr 03, 2000 at 12:34:11PM -0700, Erik van der Poel wrote:
> Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:
> > 
> > It is in the style that has been done for all the other iso-8859
> > series of standards. So yu need to do it anyway for everything
> > else.
> 
> I realize that the software must support aliases, but that is not a very
> good reason to create even more aliases that are not even used.

there are good reasons for each of the aliases.
The alisases records names that are used in some networking
environments, such as ISO communications, X, POSIX and others.
The charsets are used in may other places that just HTML and XML.

> I have occasionally wondered whether it might even be a good idea to
> deprecate and eventually remove some of the current aliases. It is hard
> to tell which aliases can be safely removed, but perhaps we could look
> at the data collected by a Web crawler, a news server and some mailing
> list archives to determine that. And we'd have a phased approach, where
> aliases are marked "deprecated" for a year or two before removing them
> from the database.
> 
> How does this sound? If volunteers could be found to do the work, would
> there be any objections?

The words I get from people is: never delete entries in registries.
And these voices are very firm.

Keld