Re: shift_jis / windows-31J

[Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com>]

On Fri, 12 Nov 2010 19:42:26 +0100, Shawn Steele  
<Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com> wrote:
>> 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.

Agreed. I was suggesting we change the registry to match the meaning of  
the names as used on the Web/Windows/etc. Sorry for the confusion.


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