Re: Proposal for insensitive registration

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

--On 22. juli 2002 18:36 -0700 Mark Davis <mark.davis@us.ibm.com> wrote:

>
> I have a couple of notes, then a suggested proposl.

Thanks for the checking!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I agree that the violators of existing rules should be removed - converted 
to comments that "this alias has been expunged". I'd like to do that to the 
overly-long ones too; does anyone have arguments for their preservation?

> 5. So I'd like to sum up the results of this discussion with a concrete
> proposal. In http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets,
>
> A. Replace the text:
>
> The character set names may be up to 40 characters taken from the
> printable characters of US-ASCII. However, no distinction is made
> between use of upper and lower case letters.
>
> with the new text:
>
> Constraints on Registered Names and Aliases
>
> The character set names may be up to 45 characters taken from the
> printable characters of US-ASCII. As per RFC 2978 no distinction is made
> between use of upper and lower case letters. While more punctuation
> characters are permitted by RFC 2978, only the following should be used:
> 0x43 '+' PLUS SIGN
> 0x45 '-' HYPHEN-MINUS
> 0x46 '.' FULL STOP
> 0x58 ':' COLON
> 0x95 '_' LOW LINE

I would like this. I would be stricter if I could, but existing practice....

> In addition, two strings are considered to conflict if after uppercasing
> them, then removing all characters except A-Z and 0-9, and then removing
> all leading zeros (zeros not preceded by a number), the strings conflict.
> No new names or aliases will be accepted for registration that conflict
> with existing names or aliases, except where they only conflict with
> aliases for the same name. For example, "IBM-037" is acceptable as an
> alias for "IBM037", but "roman08" is not acceptable as an alias for
> "macintosh" because it would conflict with "roman8", which is an existing
> alias for "hp-roman8".
>
> B. Start the data with "@START_DATA" and ending it with "@END_DATA". Add
> documentation in the header:
>
> This file is designed to be machine-readable. The data start with the
> line "@START_DATA", and ends with the line "@END_DATA". Each line of data
> is of the form:  <tag> ":" <space> value1 <space>+ value2 <space>+ value3
> or is a continuation line, starting with <space>. The values are
> interpreted according to the tags, as follows:
>
> Tag Values
> Name: value1 is the name
>  value2 is either blank, "(preferred MIME name)" or "[" <reference> "]"
>  value3 is either blank, or "[" <reference> "]"
> Alias: value1 is the alias
>  value2 is either blank, or "(preferred MIME name)"
> MIBenum: value1 is a number, described above
> Source: value1 is descriptive text. This is the only entry that can have
> continuation lines.

this actually fits the very old registration format, but not the newer 
ones. Sigh. We need to make a distinction between the registration form and 
the form of the registry, I think.

More work.
>
> C. Remove the alias: NF_Z_62-010_(1973)

Yes.

                Harald