RE: shift_jis / windows-31J

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

> Is that really true? shift_jis means "windows-31J" on Windows. For web browsers it means that. "windows-31J" is also a superset, no? 

I think that Windows-31J is mostly a superset.  (I haven't compared code points, but given the variation of encoding implementations I wouldn't be surprised if there were other differences.)

> So what would break?

?? If we restricted "shift_jis" to mean only the shift_jis and not windows-31J code points, then every document written in windows tagged "shift_jis" that contained those code points would rather suddenly fail to convert those characters on "fixed" systems.  That's probably millions of documents.

If we tagged "new" (or updated) content as "windows-31J", then systems that had not been "fixed" would not be able to read the data because we don't recognize the name.  Probably a tiny bit less breaking if we tagged new content as "csWindows-31J", but it'd still break other places that weren't used to expecting it.  That'd include probably every ASP.Net server and their clients serving shift_jis/windows-31J content.

So changing the meaning of the names to windows, mlang, and .Net is pretty much a non-starter.

-Shawn