RE: Registration of some code pages

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

> All I'm saying is that is way too vague for implementations to use. I suppose it is an incremental step to the registry getting closer to reality, but I would prefer something more drastic.

I think the current state is too complex to quantify, and moving toward UTF-8 is the only solution that really solves the problem (though it takes forever, but Mark Davis @ Google is reporting UTF-8 on the web is now over 50%!)

I'd just ignore the problem, but people see that some of our products recycle the registry names for similar-but-different purposes, and then they want us to register our behavior.  However the names already taken.  So they want a new name, but what's the point in naming our behavior with something we can't recognize?  And the requestors are ones I can't ignore.

So I'm trying to figure out a workaround that makes sense:  Registering our behavior when it differs, but provide an alternative name in case we do something different.  

Eg: Something like:


Charset name: Windows Codepage 932

Charset aliases: (None)

Suitability for use in MIME text:

Yes, windows-932 is suitable for use with subtypes of the "text" 
Content-Type. Note that windows-932 is an 8-bit, double byte
charset.  Care should be taken to choose an appropriate 
Content-Transfer-Encoding.


Published specification(s):

1) http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/dbcs/932.htm

ISO 10646 equivalency table:

http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/MICSFT/WINDOWS/CP932.TXT

Additional information:

Although not authoritative, the following references may also be of 
interest:

Microsoft windows extended "best fit" behavior:
http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/MICSFT/WindowsBestFit/bestfit932.txt

This charset is in use, but inconsistently named.

This charset is also known as Windows Code Page 932 or cp932 for 
short; these are NOT aliases.

This charset is also defined as Windows-31J, however that name
is not recognized by many applications.

Some vendors and applications use Windows Codepage 932 instead of
shift_jis, however Windows Codepage 932 has different behavior
than that of shift_jis name.  For compatibility, applications
may need to map shift_jis to Windows Codepage 932 in some cases.

This code page is a vendor specific extension of shift_jis.

Person & email address to contact for further information:

Shawn Steele
Email: Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com

Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052
U.S.A.

Intended usage: COMMON



-Shawn