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

[McDonald Ira <imcdonald@sharplabs.com>]

Hi,

Shawn's made a good point about breakage of existing software.

Adding 'variant' suffixes with a new separator to charset tags
suffers the same issues that adding 'script' subtags (as infixes,
groan...) to natural language tags yields - "simple" matching
is no longer so simple.

I think the right answer is a new piece of HTML/XML/whatever
metadata, a "charset-variant" element, which would be harmless
in any reasonably well-written existing software.

Cheers,
- Ira

Ira McDonald (Musician / Software Architect)
Chair - Linux Foundation Open Printing WG
Blue Roof Music / High North Inc
PO Box 221  Grand Marais, MI  49839
phone: +1-906-494-2434
email: imcdonald@sharplabs.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Shawn Steele [mailto:Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com]
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2007 11:22 PM
To: Martin Duerst; McDonald, Ira; Erik van der Poel
Cc: ietf-charsets@mail.apps.ietf.org
Subject: RE: Indicating charset variants (was: RE: windows 936)


> 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

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