Re: Fwd: Registration of 6 charsets

["Martin J. Duerst" <duerst@w3.org>]

At 00/04/04 11:20 -0700, Erik van der Poel wrote:
>"Martin J. Duerst" wrote:
> >
> > JIS X 0213, for each of it's characters, lists the ISO 10646
> > equivalent. That's very nice for the characters that have equivalents
> > in ISO 10646.
> >
> > However, JIS X 0213, for those characters that at present do not
> > have an ISO 10646 equivalent, also lists a value. These values
> > are given in parentheses. Some text in JIS X 0213 says that these
> > are not normative, but that's difficult to find for a Japanese
> > reader, and impossible for somebody not speaking Japanese.
> >
> > Some of the values in parentheses may turn out to coincide
> > with the  values that will eventually (hopefully rather soon)
> > be assigned to these characters by the relevant groups, but some
> > of them definitely won't coincide.
> >
> > Those values in parentheses are therefore a serious potential threat
> > to interoperability, and I consider it absolutely necessary that
> > both the RFC-to-be and the registrations themselves contain a very
> > clear warning on this issue.
>
>No, I would prefer it if IANA took an even stronger stance than that.
>These new charsets should be rejected on the grounds that JIS X 0213
>itself seriously breaks the rules. People ought to have learned by now,
>and it is simply unacceptable for a national standards body to make such
>an egregious mistake at this point.

People indeed should have learned, I fully agree with you.
And I'm glad to see such a clear position, which I hope will
make sure that this problem is addressed very seriously by
the charset reviewer and IANA.

However, I have to disagree with you that the this should hold
up the registrations. What is being asked for registration are
legacy charsets, and there is no requirement that they be
fully mappable to Unicode/ISO 10646. Where mappings are available,
they should be given, but where they are not available, they
should not hold up a registration. In the present case, the main
problem is that some entries in the printing look as if they
are mappings to Unicode/ISO 10646, but they are not. This should
clearly be documented as part of the registration.

But the codes in parentheses are officially not part of the
standard, and the standard (in the rare case that somebody indeed
reads, or can read, the relevant part) indeed says that.


>My suggestion is to ask the Japanese standards body to republish (if it
>has already been published) JIS X 0213 with those parenthesized code
>points either removed or at the very least changed to PUA (Private Use
>Area) codes, similar to the MathML spec's use of PUA in MathML 1.0:
>
>   http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-MathML/chapter6.html

This is a very good idea independent of the IANA registration.



> > And there is now doubt that the things should be registered,
> > with the necessary precautions.
>
>Would that be "now doubt" or "no doubt"?

Yes, no doubt.


Regards,   Martin.