Re: Proposal for additional Aliases to IANA registry of character sets

[umavs@ca.ibm.com]

Chris:

As far as I know, the IANA registered names are also used for INTRANET
using IETF protocols.

The IBM corporate registration (started long before the IETF age) has been
including in its numbering scheme coded character sets from many different
sources -- including several of the ISO 7-bit, 8-bit standards, the many
ISO-2022 scheme based national standards, several non-IBM-vendor defined
etc.etc.   These numbers become aliases in the form IBM-nnnnn etc.

If we state that the "the primary names assigned in the IANA registry is
the name that is 'Strongly Encouraged to be used" for OPEN interchange
(when the charset is not constrained in any manner)" then use of strings of
ISO-8859-1 etc. can be promoted widely.  In these cases, the ALIASEs are
meant to be used for "limited use contexts".   With the printer MIB
numbers, even in the IETF open context there will be multiple 'names'.

Unfortunately any ALIAS has a tendency to leak and they have to be
equivalenced by implementations expecting to respect the aliases.  Short of
BANNING aliases this cannot be avoided.

Also as Markus has stated singling out the 8859-1 related IBMxxxx is not
justified, neither deleting the existing aliases for many of the ISO
standards, without impacting many existing implementations.

V.S. Umamaheswaran, Ph.D.
Globalization Centre of Competency,  IBM Canada Lab, 8200 Warden Avenue,
B3/979, Markham, Ontario,  L6G 1C7
Ph: +1 905-413-3474 (Tie 969); Fax:905 413 4903; Internet:
umavs@ca.ibm.com; Notes: umavs@ibmca; VM: umavs@torolab2