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

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

> Everybody would still be allowed to use a label without a variant.
> Most people would choose that, because that's what's currently
> supported. But some applications, and some data, where it really
> matters, could be more precise.

Yup. Unicode offers that precision :)  You lose that precision though if it ends up going to a client that doesn't recognized the extension and doesn't know how to parse it.  Then it becomes very imprecise.

> For people and applications where exact conversion
> is important, correctly and precisely labeling an encoding variant
> can be the first step to migrating to Unicode.

I can see that, but then I'd suggest another tag if possible, so that it didn't conflict with existing software.  For example, if I wanted to port all of my invoices I wouldn't want a legacy reporting tool to break because a different label was used.  Perhaps that information could be provided in meta data though.

- Shawn