Re: Registering a charset alias

[Erik van der Poel <erikv@google.com>]

Hi Patrik,

Thanks for offering to bring this up at an IETF/W3C coordination call.
There are many character encoding issues, some more important than
others. So I'd recommend splitting the issues into categories, and
then perhaps also prioritizing the items within each category.

(1) Adding new aliases. Relatively uncontroversial, but at some point,
we have to stop. That stopping point may be slightly controversial.

(2) Merging charsets. Some IANA charsets have distinct names, but are
treated as aliases in major implementations.

(3) Supersets. Perhaps in a separate file, not in the same file as the
normal charset names and aliases.

(4) Preferred MIME names. Some charsets have aliases but do not have
"preferred MIME name" attached to any of them.

It might be a bit too ambitious (or even unnecessary) to include all
of these in a single coordination call.

We also need to remember that charsets are used in protocols other
than Web protocols (e.g. email).

Erik

2009/8/14 Patrik Fältström <paf@cisco.com>:
> On 14 aug 2009, at 16.34, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>
>> One of our main goals with HTML5 has been to make the browser space more
>> competitive.
>
> Which of course is a good goal!
>
>> This includes documenting in great detail what rules browsers need to
>> implement in order to render legacy Web documents. This in turn includes
>> such rules as treating iso-8859-1 as if windows-1252 was specified and
>> having x-x-big5 be an alias for big5.
>
> Well, I want to once again point out that they should not be aliases. One
> might be a superset of the other, but not an alias.
>
> For example, the Windows-1252 codepage coincides with ISO-8859-1 in the code
> ranges 0x00 to 0x7F and 0xA0 to 0xFF, but not for the range 0x80 to 0x9F.
> And that is a very important distinction that from my point of view
> _absolutely_ should be pointed out in any text that suggest such
> equivalences.
>
> But, lets take this up at a coordination call.
>
>   Patrik
>
>