Re: some IANA registrations look like repertoires not charsets?

[ned.freed@mrochek.com]

> I looked up some names in the IANA charset names list, and I suspect that
> some names are really only repertoires (collections) of abstract characters.

I suspect this assumes intent that wasn't there. The charset registry is known
to be messy and is known to contain a bunch of stuff that isn't well defined.
Assuming the intent really was to register repetoires seems like a stretch to
me.

> Without any specified encoding scheme, they would not qualify as charsets.

It isn't particularly relevant to the matter at hand, but the fact of the
matter is that a charset doesn't require an encoding scheme. The requirement is
instead that there be a mapping from octets to characters. Whether this is
implemented by means of a CCS/CES pair or something else is up to the
registration. Charsets like iso-2022-jp certainly don't consist of a single
CCS/CES pair.

> I wonder if they were intended to be (or are in fact) used with particular
> encoding schemes.

More likely it was assumed the encoding was implied by the registration.

In any case, past attempts to clean up the registry haven't been successful.
And given that actual use of any of this junk is unlikely to exist, it
hasn't proved to be sufficiently problematic to force the issue.

				Ned