Re: Registering a charset alias

[Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>]

On Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:09:59 +0200, Patrik Fältström <paf@cisco.com> wrote:
> No, it does not make any sense registering them, as they are not
> guaranteed to be unique.
>
> Instead people should be informed in whatever documentation /
> implementation that talk about x-sjis that that name should not be
> used, and instead something without the "x-" prefix should be used.
>
> Yes, this will lead to problems as long as there are pages and stuff
> out there that do refer to the x- prefixed name, but there is not much
> we can do. The x- prefix is defined to be "not defined".
>
> I.e. people should really actively work for moving away from the x-
> names.

For all practical purposes x-x-big5 means big5 when used in a document on the Web. From a theoretical perspective this might not always be the case, but all consuming software acts this way and all documents out there that use this expect consuming software to act in that way. Hoping it will go away does not make it so.

Also, by leaving this undocumented we're creating a barrier to entry for applications wanting to consume Web documents, such as new Web browsers. They will have to reverse engineer other Web browsers in order to figure out how to process these documents. I think that is a bad thing.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/