RE: shift_jis / windows-31J

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

My incentive is that I'm being requested to use the windows-31J name in our documentation since that can be interpreted as being "correct" per the standard.  This request is being made by people that seek interoperability.  However windows does not recognize the windows-31J name, and changing everything would break all of the existing uses of this code page.  Eg: A "fixed" system would try to use windows-31J for their web page, and all the un-updated systems would fail to read it.

So if someone has any other suggestions on how to record that, in practice, shift_jis doesn't always give you exactly the shift_jis behavior on all systems, I'd love to hear it :)  

I certainly agree that these are legacy encodings, however for that exact reason it's nearly impossible to "fix" the behavioral discrepencies between our products and the standards definitions because actually changing the encoding, or the encoding that the name points to would break millions of documents for millions of users.

-Shawn

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http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnste


________________________________________
From: Anne van Kesteren [annevk@opera.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2010 3:45 AM
To: Shawn Steele; NARUSE, Yui
Cc: ietf-charsets@mail.apps.ietf.org
Subject: Re: shift_jis / windows-31J

On Thu, 11 Nov 2010 10:57:03 +0100, NARUSE, Yui <naruse@airemix.jp> wrote:
> I object to create new alias name.

Agreed. These are legacy encodings. We should be trying to contain them
and fix the interoperability problems, not make the problems worse.


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