Re: Registration of new charset: ISO 8859-16

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

"IANA" wrote on 2001-08-23 23:25 UTC:
> I'm in the process of registering this.
> Is there an Alias for this new Character Set?

I don't see a need for any aliases, but I don't object too strongly if
you really want to add any for consistency with the registration of the
other ISO 8859 parts. The other ISO 8859 parts have various amounts of
aliases registered (mostly for no good reason I suspect), and the
equivalents for ISO-8859-16 would probably be some or all of:

Alias: iso-ir-226
Alias: ISO_8859-16:2001
Alias: ISO_8859-16
Alias: latin10
Alias: l10

In general, I believe that aliases are an evil thing and the fewer there
are the better. Aliases should in my opinion only be used to handle
inconsistent historic practice, but they should not be introduced for
new charsets. The whole point of a registry is to have *single* exact
unique names for objects and conventions after all. The aliases were ill
conceived from the beginning. For instance: The existing ISO-IR-xxx
aliases are technically wrong, because the ISO IR number refers only to
the upper half (G1) of the 8-bit character set, not to the full charset.
Some aliases that contain the year of publication are by now obsolete,
because ISO has published the second edition of the older ISO 8859
parts. These are just some of the aspects why I think the aliases were a
bad idea to start with.

Also note that the capitalization in the registry is inconsistent. It
says "iso-8859-14" but "ISO-8859-15". The entire thing probably deserves
a cleanup.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>