RE: Registering a charset alias

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

> That would be great. The Firefox, Safari and Chrome lists should all
> be available, since they're open source. Shawn, would Microsoft be
> willing to publish the latest Windows/IE list of
> charsets/aliases/supersets?

I'm not sure they're easy to find, I stuck a list of aliases that .Net uses at http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnste/archive/2009/08/18/alternate-encoding-names-recognized-by-net-ie.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.text.encoding.getencodings.aspx has a list of the names that .Net calls the various encodings (webname)

Note that IE's code page detection is pretty fixed and we're suggesting use of UTF-8 for new content, it's unlikely that any additional aliases would be added or changed in many significant ways.

I think most of our encodings don't lend themselves to the superset concept.  There're probably variations for individual code points even in closely related code pages.  GB18030 might be an exception there.

I'd much rather have the community push for UTF encodings rather than trying to do perfect detection of imperfect code pages.  Even when names are identical there are still unique quirks of different systems with various code pages.  Sometimes it's just a code point difference, other times it's a bigger problem.

-Shawn