Re: Fwd: Registration of 6 charsets

[erik@netscape.com (Erik van der Poel)]

"Martin J. Duerst" wrote:
> 
> At 00/04/04 11:20 -0700, Erik van der Poel wrote:
> >
> >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.

I never said that they should be fully mappable to Unicode/10646.

> Where mappings are available,
> they should be given, but where they are not available, they
> should not hold up a registration.

As far as I know, there are no IANA rules that require a charset
registration to be accompanied by Unicode/10646 mappings.

> 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.

If the Japanese standards body approves of the way JIS X 0213 is
written, and publishes it, that is its own business. However, if they
were to submit their document to the Unicode Technical Committee or
ISO/IEC JTC1 SC2/WG2, it would undoubtedly be voted down because of the
appearance of unassigned, non-PUA codes in that document, whether
normative or not.

IANA is also an international organization, with a world-wide scope
similar to UTC and WG2. So I think it would be quite appropriate for
IANA to look carefully at the incoming charset registrations. If there
is anything at all about the registration that looks like it might cause
interoperability problems, it is the duty of the readers of this mailing
list to point that out, and I thank you for reminding me of that
particular problem in JIS X 0213.

As a member of this mailing list, I now raise this objection, and I can
only hope that the charset reviewer takes it seriously. We shouldn't let
the Japanese standards body get away with such behavior.

> >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.

No, my suggestion is that we reject the charset registrations until we
see some proof that JIS X 0213 has been corrected.

Also, I'd like to know which escape sequences have been assigned to JIS
X 0213. I had a look in the ISO registry, but I couldn't find it:

  http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ISO-IR/

If JIS X 0213's escape sequence(s) haven't been registered by ISO yet, I
think IANA should wait until that has happened. ISO-2022-JP-3 is not
usable until we know what the escape sequences are, and that they are
legitimate.

Erik