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Re: windows-874 new registration

* Erik van der Poel wrote:
>On 6/16/07, Frank Ellermann <nobody@xyzzy.claranet.de> wrote:
>> + UTF-8 is preferred to windows-874 when permissible for Thai.
>>
>> For such more or less obsolete charsets, why do you write COMMON ?
>
>Where do we draw the line between "obsolete" and "common"? In 2001,
>0.249% of HTML documents with a meta charset tag were labelled
>windows-874. In 2007, that percentage is 0.139%.

I don't think Frank is suggesting to mark it obsolete. The measure is:

   A charset should therefore be registered ONLY if it adds significant
   functionality that is valuable to a large community, OR if it
   documents existing practice in a large community.  Note that charsets
   registered for the second reason should be explicitly marked as being
   of limited or specialized use and should only be used in Internet
   messages with prior bilateral agreement.

I am afraid your numbers don't help us much to make a decision, there
are infinitely many HTML documents with a <meta> charset so you picked
just some subset to determine those numbers without saying which subset,
HTML <meta> elements are not the only relevant context, and you don't
say anything about other labels; an answer based just on your numbers
might well be different if windows-874 was the 2nd most used label or
the 42nd most used one.

Given "UTF-8 is preferred to windows-874 when permissible" it seems to
me the registration does not add significant functionality that is val-
uable to a large community, and LIMITED USE would therefore be more
appropriate.
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