Re: Indicating charset variants (was: RE: windows 936)

[Martin Duerst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>]

At 22:52 07/09/21, Erik van der Poel wrote:
>I don't think it's such a good idea. The Web has come a long way in
>terms of labelling charsets. In the early days, very few people
>bothered to insert the HTML <meta> with charset, and even fewer people
>inserted the HTTP charset. Nowadays, around 74% of the documents in
>Google's index have the meta charset.

Even if some percentage of these is wrong (do you have any idea?),
that's definitely a lot of progress.

>The commonly used characters are currently being conveyed correctly
>from human to human by using the common charset names on the wire.
>If/when you start to introduce charset variant names that are not
>understood by the clients, even the commonly used characters cannot be
>viewed, let alone the rare characters supposedly enabled by these
>variant names.
>
>Of course, if we get all the clients to upgrade first, we won't have
>this problem. But are these minor variants worth all that trouble?

It's definitely a good question. For some applications, the answer
is clearly 'no'. But for others, it may easily be 'yes'.

Please note that the first step towards supporting these variant
tags would be that recepients check if they support a full variant
tag, and if not, they look for '--' in the tag, cut off the variant
part, and try again. That's the main advantage and purpose of a
special separator. Of course even that requires an update to
receivers.

Regards,    Martin.s


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