RE: [ietf-charsets] Recent charset additions and issues

["McDonald, Ira" <imcdonald@sharplabs.com>]

Hi,

The missing 'cs' Aliases (used in IETF Printer MIB, RFC 1759)
are currently constructed by a machine-generation algorithm in 
my C tool that generates the IANA Charset MIB from the latest
IANA Charset Registry (the plaintext file).  But they should
be correctly added to the Registry itself.

Note that the IESG-approved Printer MIB v2 (with new objects
and many implementations) and Finisher MIB v1 both import
the 'cs' Aliases as an enumeration from IANA Charset MIB.

We have recently learned that UP3I standards consortium
plans to use the semantics of the Finisher MIB in their
work, so they will presumably also depend on the 'cs' tags
in their XML schema translation of the Finisher MIB.

Cheers,
- Ira (co-editor of Printer MIB v2 and Finisher MIB)

PS - The IESG-approved IANA Charset MIB latest draft is in
the directory:
    ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/

in the file:
    draft-mcdonald-iana-charset-mib-02.txt (10 Feb 2003)

Ira McDonald (Musician / Software Architect)
Blue Roof Music / High North Inc
PO Box 221  Grand Marais, MI  49839
phone: +1-906-494-2434
email: imcdonald@sharplabs.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Hoffman / IMC [mailto:phoffman@imc.org]
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 7:40 PM
To: ietf-charsets@iana.org
Subject: Re: [ietf-charsets] Recent charset additions and issues


At 6:15 PM -0500 1/29/04, Bruce Lilly wrote:
>One issue is that the MIBenum values assigned to these charsets does not
>seem to be consistent with the description above and with the reference
>information at the indicated URIs.

IANA asked me where we wanted the registrations. After talking with a 
few folks, I told them:

=====
Registration of new charset KOI7-switched, March 30
	Vendor

Registration of ISO-8859-11, April 27
	Set By Standards Organizations

Register EBCDIC Character Set "OSD_EBCDIC_DF04_1", November 3
Register EBCDIC Character Set "OSD_EBCDIC_DF04_15", November 3
Register EBCDIC Character Set "OSD_EBCDIC_DF03_IRV", November 3
	Vendor

Registration of new charset [Amiga-1251], November 7
	Vendor
=====

They appear to have ignored my request on the EBCDIC registrations.

>Conversely, it is not clear why KOI7-switched has been
>assigned a Vendor MIBenum value, nor which vendor might be responsible.

"Vendor" doesn't really mean "a specific vendor", it pretty much 
means "not 'Reserved', 'Set By Standards Organizations', or 'Unicode 
/ 10646'".

>Another issue is that the three OSD_EBCDIC_DF* charsets give no indication
>in the source documents as to whether or not the charsets are suitable for
>use with MIME text.  Such an indication is supposed to be part of the
>registration (RFC 2978 section 5).

Whoops, good catch. I missed that.

>   A related issue is the fact that the
>registry itself provides no such indication for any charsets, which
>is at best highly inconvenient for implementors.

I will take this up with IANA and will try to get a future version of 
the database to contain it.

>None of the charsets above have been provided with an alias beginning with
>"cs" for use with the printer MIB as discussed in section 2.3 of RFC 2978.
>If that were consistently done, there would be no charset with a confusing
>Alias: None
>line in the registry.

Good catch; these should be added. I'll work on that.

>How can we minimize these issues in the future?  I believe that use 
>of RFC 2978
>(or a successor) as a checklist during the review process would 
>help.  I believe
>that the addition to the registration template of a brief history of the
>charset origin (originator and affiliation) would help in determining
>whether a particular charset is a Vendor charset or Set By [a] Standards
>Organization[s].  Finally, inclusion of a "MIME-text" field in the registry
>with a yes/no value would not only be a boon to implementors of
applications
>which use charsets in a MIME context, but would prompt IANA to obtain a
>statement of MIME text compatibility if it is lacking in the registration
>application.

All of those sound like excellent suggestions.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium