Re: Volunteer needed to serve as IANA charset reviewer

[Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com>]

[cc's trimmed]
On Thu September 7 2006 11:56, Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 06:33:48AM -0400, Bruce Lilly wrote:
> > the registration procedure has long said that "ASCII" is disallowed, yet it
> > is in fact registered as an alias).
> 
> There seems to be a problem here, but maybe it whould then be the
> procedures that be revised, as ASCII is a well known name for a specific
> character set.

Quoting RFC 2046:
"  The character set name "ASCII" is reserved and must not
   be used for any purpose.
"

The same text appeared in RFC 1521 and in RFC 1341, dated 1992.

[corrigenda]  The current registration procedures per se do not
forbid "ASCII", but MIME initially established charset registrations,
and the "for any purpose" certainly seems clear.  Quoting RFC 1341:
"           Several other MIME fields, notably
            including character set names, are likely to have new values
            defined  over time.  In order to ensure that the set of such
            values is  developed  in  an  orderly,  well-specified,  and
            public  manner,  MIME  defines  a registration process which
            uses the Internet Assigned Numbers  Authority  (IANA)  as  a
            central  registry  for  such  values.
"
And RFC 1341 Appendix F section 2 is, as far as I know, the initial
(abbreviated) character set registration procedure.

So at least as far as MIME is concerned, "ASCII" has always been
forbidden; the default and preferred MIME name for ANSI X3.4 is
"US-ASCII".

One problem is that "ASCII" has been [mis]used for things other than
one specific character set and is therefore not unambiguous.

Also, we should distinguish informal usage from registered names
used in protocols.

As with most IANA registries, it would be quite unwise to remove something
once registered.  So I wouldn't want to simply remove "ASCII" leaving no
trace in case there is some archived content which used that alias in spite
of the prohibition against such use.  I would support a mechanism to mark
(clearly, and in the registry) a name as deprecated, along with a
"MUST NOT generate" rule applicable to deprecated names.

------------------

Another footnote: By noting that Ned would make a fine charset reviewer,
I am not indicating any fault with Paul Hoffman, who is still listed as
charset reviewer on the IANA site (http://www.iana.org/numbers.html#C)
and who has done a fine job as evidenced by his past participation on this
mailing list.