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

Re: Volunteer needed to serve as IANA charset reviewer

Ned and me, as newly appointed charset reviewers,
plan to first address pending registrations, and once
they are dealt with, looking at ways to clean up the
registry.

At 03:18 06/10/02, Claus F$BgS(Bber wrote:
>Frank Ellermann schrieb:
>> Claus F$BgS(Bber wrote:
>>> "UNKNOWN-8BIT" (already used by some mail transport agents
>> First defined in RFC 1428, used in RFC 1700 and RFC 2557, it's
>> already registered.
>
>Oops.

 From a purely personal viewpoint, this one actually occasionally
came in handy.

>>> "UNKNOWN-UTF16"
>> What's the difference from UTF-16 ?
>
>UTF-16 "SHOULD be interpreted as being big-endian" if there's no BOM, RFC 2781, 4.3. UNKNOWN-UTF16 would not have such a fall back.

Has UNKNOWN-UTF-16 been proposed formally, or is this just an
idea floated in an email? As a reviewer, I'd prefer to deal
with "really existing charsets" first.

>>> with alias "UNICODE".
>> Ugh, thanks, but no thanks.
>
>The idea is to deprecate the label "UNICODE" by tying it to an incompletly specified charset.

Personally, I agree with the idea of deprecating "Unicode".
As a charset reviewer, I think this should be done by just
noting the entry as DECRECATED or OBSOLETE or some such,
rather than by registering additional aliases.

>>> "UNKNOWN-ISO-8859" with alias "ANSI".
>>> "UNKNOWM-IBMPC" with alias "OEM".
>> One of those could do, "unknown-ascii-8bit", alias "oem".
>
>We already have UNKNOWN-8BIT.
>
>When you convert legacy data, you often DO know that something is in a DOSish (IBMPC-based) or Windowsish (ANSI-based) charset. Having charset labels to carry this information (instead of the unspecified UNKNOWN-8BIT) is a good idea.

To repeat, as a reviewer, I'd prefer to deal with "really existing
charsets" first. We may be able to consider ideas such as these
later, if we look at more and less precise labels for encodings
(e.g. labels to indicate various variants of Shift_JIS).


Regards,    Martin.


#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp