Re: Registration of new charset: ISO 8859-16

[Keld Jørn Simonsen <keld@dkuug.dk>]

I would recommend to register a limited set of aliases for iso-8859-16.
They are useful for identification, and also reference in utilities
as recode etc.

I share Markus aim to have as few aliases as possible, and
the aliases I have asked for registration of, were only names that
were in use at the time of registering. For new charsets we
probably do not have that problem.

Markus' set of names seems appropiate to me.

Kind regards
keld

On Fri, Aug 24, 2001 at 11:31:15AM +0100, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> "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/>
>