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

[Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com>]

Bccing Mike Ksar.  We've chatted over here and I (shawnste@microsoft.com) would be a better contact for code pages in the future.
 
I'll try to compile a list shortly, it may take a few days because I'd like to get it right the first time :).

.NET applications can pass charset names "on the wire", and should be mostly the same as MLang's.  Microsoft's email clients & servers recognize the same names.

One thing we would like to avoid is accidentally introducing new aliases that aren't currently used.  If that happened then other mail agents could accidentally pass the "wrong" name and interoperability could suffer.

- Shawn

-----Original Message-----
From: Erik van der Poel [mailto:erikv@google.com] 
Sent: Poʻahā, Nowemapa 02, 2006 11:47 PM
To: Shawn Steele
Cc: ietf-charsets@iana.org; Mike Ksar
Subject: Re: Windows Code Pages 932, 936, 949 and 950

Hi Shawn,

Yes, I think it would be helpful to have the lists of recognized and
unrecognized names, particularly for IE (i.e. MLang). (The .NET
framework may not be as relevant, unless it is directly and often
involved in charset names as they appear "on the wire". I don't know
.NET very well.)

If you also know what the situation is in the email area (as opposed
to the Web), that would be good to know too. I.e. do Microsoft email
agents respond to charset names? And if so, which ones? Same as MLang?

Thank you!

Erik

On 11/2/06, Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com> 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.  Our names aren't consistent and registering a superset of the patterns as aliases would probably lead to trouble.
>
> One reason I'd recommend not registering aliases that Microsoft products don't actually recognize for Microsoft code pages is that it is unlikely that we'd start responding to "new" names since that might cause user confusion and compatibility problems.

>
> If it would help I can provide a list of the names and aliases that we actually use for the various code pages, and names that we don't recognize but have been I know they've been referred to (like CP1252).
>
> - Shawn
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: Erik van der Poel [mailto:erikv@google.com]
> Sent: Thu 11/2/2006 9:55 PM
> To: ietf-charsets@iana.org
> Cc: Mike Ksar
> Subject: Re: Windows Code Pages 932, 936, 949 and 950
>
>
>
> But of course windows-936 is already registered, as an alias of gbk.
>
> E.
>
> On 11/2/06, Erik van der Poel <erikv@google.com> wrote:
> > It turns out that MSIE does not support the following charset names:
> >
> > windows-932
> > windows-936
> > 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, gb2312, euc-kr
> > and big5, respectively.
> >
> > If we are emphatic about cp1252 not being an alias for windows-1252
> > for interoperability reasons, then for the same reasons, we should not
> > register windows-932, windows-936, windows-949 and windows-950.
> >
> > (Windows-874 is supported by MSIE, so it will probably be OK to
> > register this one.)
> >
> > Erik
> >
>
>
>