Re: Questions on charset registration procedures

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <Harald@Alvestrand.no>]

At 18:22 30.05.2000 +0800, Nicky YW YICK wrote:


>Dear Sir/Madam,
>
>      To facilitate electronic communication using Chinese within Hong Kong, a
>set of Chinese characters was developed by the Government of the Hong Kong
>Special Administrative Region in 1999. The details of the character set can be
>found in "http://www.digital21.gov.hk/eng/hkscs/introduction.html";. In 
>order to
>have better communication using this character set in Internet community, we
>would like to register this character set in IANA registration.

hmmm....this may not be what you want. More later.


>      It is highly appreciated if you can provide information about the 
> following
>questions relating to IANA charset registration procedures.
>
>Q1.  Is there requirements of the proposer submitting charset 
>registration? If yes, what is the requirements? Should the charset 
>registration proposer be an individual, a company, an organization, the 
>one define the standard, etc ?

The requirement is that the proposer be nameable, and that we can contact him.
Usually this means that a human is the preferred submitter.
What he represents, the IETF does not want to care about.

>Q2.  As stated in RFC 2278, the registration procedure is started by 
>sending the proposed charset registration to "ietf-charset@iana.org". 
>Should this charset registration procedure be done periodically or on 
>request ? How long will it take ?

the length of the procedure depends on the amount of discussion, and the 
response of the submitter.
The minimum length of the procedure is 14 days.

>Q3.  After submitting the charset registration application by the 
>proposer, when will the charset be officially announced and published ?

There is currently some problem at IANA which prevents the publication of 
approved character sets, so I must admit that I do not know this.

>Q4.  Will the proposer be acknowledged before the official
>announcement/publication of the charset?

No such procedure has been put in place. I, as charset reviewer, usually CC 
the ietf-charsets list when I make a recommendation to IANA; you are 
encouraged to become a member.

Back to the proposed registration:
from the webpage you quoted, I quote:

"The HKSCS, as a supplementary character set of the Big-5 and ISO 10646 
coding schemes, contains Chinese characters needed in Chinese computing in 
Hong Kong but are not contained in either the Big-5 or ISO 10646 standard 
character set"

This fits with the definition of "character set" that is the basis for 
"coded character set" in RFC 2278 paragraph 2.4, but NOT with the 
definition of "charset" given in paragraph 2.3.
What I think you are looking to register is a scheme documenting the 
encoding of documents containing characters from Big-5 + HKSCS, or ISO 
10646(current) + HKSCS; this would involve 3 parts:

   - A reference to the variant of Big-5 or ISO 10646 you want to base
     yourself on
   - A definition of the switching, subsetting or private-use-space usage
   - A definition of the set of characters you want to use.

HKSCS is the third of these, as far as I can see; the "charset" you should 
register is the combination of all 3 of the above.

Hope this helped!

              Harald A

--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, EDB Maxware, Norway
Harald.Alvestrand@edb.maxware.no