Re: Fwd: Volunteer needed to serve as IANA charset reviewer

[Frank Ellermann <nobody@xyzzy.claranet.de>]

Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> Forwarding a contribution from Mark Davis.

> http://mail.apps.ietf.org/ietf/charsets/msg01510.html

That belongs to what was announced as "considerable backlog":
It's not about the amount of pending requests (a dozen or so),
but about their age (minus two they are from last year).

> useless (inaccessable or unstable) references; there is no
> practical way to figure out what the charset definition is.

Yes, that's bad.  As a first approximation I'd try something
like http://purl.net/net/cp/874 - but that also changed, some
years ago I could ask for 1004, now I'm supposed to know what
it is.  Apparently ICU had its very own "decruft" experience.

> The RFC itself does not settle important issues of identity
> among charsets. If a new mapping is added to a charset
> converter, is that a different charset (and thus needs a
> different registration) or not?

In CharMapML you've allowed version info for minor cases. Some
historic oddities like 0x1A -> 0x7F -> 0x1C -> 0x1A are IMHO
not more relevant.  Others like "modulo 190 Unicode" might be
interesting, if compared with "modulo 243 distances".  Just an
example.

> it would be a huge amount of effort for very little return.

Meaning what, delete registry and RFC as hopeless ?  Looking
at the list in RFC 3808 we're talking about 250 charsets.  

If you want to resolve ambiguities like the "IBM rotation"
(see above), PC graphics for C0, and cases like "in theory
unassigned" vs. "in practice roundtrip" for 1252 etc, what is
it, 1000 charsets, how much do you have in ICU ?  
 
> I'm being blocked

Maybe the list server has only your @jtcsv.com address.

Frank