Re: Registering a charset alias

[Ned Freed <ned.freed@mrochek.com>]

> Hello Anne, others,

> I haven't seen anything on this from Ned (who is the Primary Expert, see
> http://www.iana.org/protocols/ (search for "Character Sets")), so with
> my hat of Secondary Expert, I agree with Ira that in order to add an
> alias to a registration, you just send in an updated registration form
> to this list. Unless Ned disagrees (or somebody appeals to the Area
> Director or the IESG), please consider that the 'official opinion'.

That's my understanding of the process as well.

> Please note that *you* have to submit the registration form to this
> list, *you* have to update it if necessary to reflect comments on the
> list, and *you* have to submit it to IANA and the reviewers after the
> review period passed successfully so that it can actually be registered.
> We (Ned and myself) are just Expert Reviewers, not active registry
> maintainers, and IANA just carries out secretarial functions.

Exactly so. We review, IANA does the upates. They have their own tracking
system for all this stuff and you have to get your request into that for it to
go anywhere.

> Please submit each update in a separate mail (a single request in case
> you want to add two or more aliases to the same charset) with a clear
> Subject. You may want to start with just a couple of requests in order
> to get some exercise and test the waters.

> I personally don't like aliases, but the charset registry already has
> lots of them so that the additional damage of adding a few more, in
> particular if they are backed well by actual data and implementations,
> isn't a problem when compared to the benefit of having all relevant
> alias data in a single place.

> As for aliases starting with x-, I just did a fairly detailed reread of
> the relevant specs, and I haven't found anything prohibiting a
> registered charset to start with x-. What the specs say is that you MUST
> use a x- prefix for private use, but NOT that an x- prefix is limited to
> private use and cannot be registered. There are other registries that
> have accepted registration of tokens starting with x-, e.g.
> http://www.iana.org/assignments/message-headers/prov-headers.html. So my
> opinion is that registering a charset alias starting with x- overall is
> beneficial for the community if such an alias is or has been in wide use
> (which is certainly the case at least for x-sjis). Also, years ago,
> registration of charsets was handled very, very restrictively, and that
> as far as I understand led to more x- use than would be necessary. So to
> some extent, it was the registry's fault, and so the registry should
> take over the responsibility for cases such as x-sjis.

I'm not especialy happy with the situation, but I agree with this
assessment.

				Ned