Re: Windows Code Pages 932, 936, 949 and 950

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

Shawn Steele wrote:

> Some of the code pages (I'd have to check which ones) respond to
> x-windows-nnn instead of windows-nnn in the .NET framework, which
> is similar to MLang, which is what IE uses to map names to actual
> code pages.

> IMHO it would be worth using only the names that MLang or .Net (or
> IE) supports for aliasing windows code page names.

Yes, but we can't register x-anything.  X- is reserved in RFC 2045
chapter 5, and RFC 2978 inherits that in chapter 3.1.  The x- rules
are always the same, nothing special wrt charsets.

IOW we need a simple way to break this rule if necessary.  We could
pro forma register "anything" mentioning that only x-anything works
in practice.  Or because we always need a cswhatever we could take
csanything.

> it is unlikely that we'd start responding to "new" names since that
> might cause user confusion and compatibility problems.

Dropping the x- in x-anything shouldn't be _too_ confusing, ignoring
the "minor" trouble that it won't work for old = existing systems :-(

Apparently windows-874, 936, and 1252 are clear.  That leaves:

>> windows-932
[...]
>> windows-949
>> windows-950

>> Of course, MSIE does support those code pages, but the most commonly
>> used names for those code pages in MSIE are shift_jis, 
[...]
>> euc-kr and big5, respectively.

These names are already registered, we can't use them for something
_different_ outside of the "additional info" for 932, 949, and 950.

How about csWindows-932, etc. ?  No other cs contains a hyphen, so
maybe it's a bad idea.

Frank