[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Volunteer needed to serve as IANA charset reviewer

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

Maybe it should be possible to register charsets that _are_ ambigous. Of 
course, there should be a warning not to use them if at all possible. 
Still, some applications which don't know the charset (converters from 
other formats) might make use of them if its not feasible to detect the 
true charset.

"ASCII" could be an alias for "UNKNOWN-7BIT" (or "UNKNOWN-ISO-646", 
"UNKNOWN-ASCII"?)

Other possible ambigous charsets could be:

"UNKNOWN-8BIT" (already used by some mail transport agents when 
MIMEifying messages).
"UNKNOWN-EBCDIC"
"UNKNOWN-UTF16" with alias "UNICODE".
"UNKNOWN-ISO-8859" with alias "ANSI".
"UNKNOWM-IBMPC" with alias "OEM".

Claus