Re: shift_jis / windows-31J

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

Does the updated version sent Friday work for you?

I think completely pointing shift_jis to the windows 932 behavior would maybe break others, but I don't know for sure.

- Shawn

Sent from my Windows Phone

On Nov 16, 2010, at 5:48 AM, "Anne van Kesteren" <annevk@opera.com> wrote:

> 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/
>