Re: Last Call: IANA Charset Registration Procedures to BCP

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

At 00/07/08 07:31 -0700, ned.freed@innosoft.com wrote:
>>It looks like by chance I'm just barely in time for this last call.
>
>>Some comments, none major showstoppers:
>
>Good to hear. I'm basically looking at this as "do the ones that are
>OK to handle as last call comments". Stuff that requires discussion or
>a new last call needs to wait for the next time around.

Makes sense. But I don't agree on all points with your classification.


>>- Section 3.1, 'All registered charsets MUST note whether or not they
>>    are suitable for use in MIME text.' and Sec. 6, 'Suitability for
>>    use in Mime text:': As recent discussion has shown, this may
>>    benefit from some careful clarification, but I guess this already
>>    is on your todo list.
>
>It is on my to-do list, but it isn't something I want to address in this
>registration procedure update.

It seems to be the case that:
- There is consensus (in the IETF sense) on the meaning of the
   above sentences.
- It was shown that the interpretation of the above sentences
   may pose some problems.

This seems to be a typical case for a last call correction.


>>- 'All registered charsets MUST be specified in a *stable*':
>>    What about extensions, such as for ISO 10646? What about
>>    variants, such as for Shift_JIS (vendor extensions as well
>>    as mapping variants, for the later see
>>    e.g. http://www.w3.org/TR/japanese-xml/).
>
>What about them? The requirement is for a stable specification and nothing
>more. Updating the specification is OK as long as whatever rules that
>specification gives for updating are followed. (We have a detailed set of
>such rules for UTF-8, for example.)
>
>The primary point here is that we don't want a definition based on a 
>pointer to
>a document which then vanishes, leaving us with a name and nothing else.

Thanks for giving the interpretation of 'stable'. This is a reasonable
interpretation, but there are others, and the doc should make clear
what interpretation is intended.


>>- 3.3 talks about names, and a primary name. The registry uses
>>    the terms 'name', 'alias', and also 'preferred MIME name'.
>>    It would be very helpful if the terminology were unified.
>
>That's an issue for the registry, not for the present document.

Well, if it cannot be unified, it would at least be helpful
to point out that there are differences, and which terms
correspond to which.


>>- [ISO-10646]: Please update this to refer to the 2000 version!
>
>The ISO catalogue doesn't list it yet so I didn't update it. If I
>get a reference before publication I'll handle it as an author edit.

Below is an excerpt from a mail from mike Ksar, convener of the
WG responsible for ISO 10646:

 >>>>
From: mike_ksar@hp.com

      ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000 Information technology -- Universal
      Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS) -- Part 1: Architecture and
      Basic Multilingual Plane
 >>>>

Regards,   Martin.