RE: New charset registry entry for iso-8859-11, anybody?

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

Windows/.Net treat a request for "iso-8859-11" as "windows-874", same as "tis-620".  Technically they aren't quite the same thing.  It might be nice if whatever happened acknowledged the variants, as we've done for some other code pages.  Windows' names though, would break existing data if they changed.

-Shawn

-----Original Message-----
From: Ned Freed [mailto:ned.freed@mrochek.com] 
Sent: Monday, October 1, 2012 8:05 AM
To: "Martin J. Dürst"
Cc: ietf-charsets
Subject: Re: New charset registry entry for iso-8859-11, anybody?

> Dear Charset Experts,

> Behind the scenes, there have been some discussions about adding an 
> entry for ISO-8859-11, Latin/Thai.

> However, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-11) says 
> the following:

>  >>>>
> ISO-8859-11 is not a registered IANA charset name despite following 
> the normal pattern for IANA charsets based on the ISO 8859 series. 
> However, the close equivalent TIS-620 (which lacks the non-breaking 
> space) is registered with IANA, and can without problems be used for 
> ISO/IEC 8859-11, since the no-break space has a code which was 
> unallocated in TIS-620.
>  >>>>

> I would like to get your feedback on the following alternative proposals:

> 1) Leave everything as is.


> 2) Add an alias "ISO-8859-11" to the TIS-620 entry (acknowledging 
> current practice and ignoring the official difference at 0xA0 (*)).


> 3) Add a new entry of the form:

> Name: ISO-8859-11 (preferred MIME name)
> MIBenum: [TBD]
> Source: ISO/IEC 8859-11:2001
> Alias: csISOLatinThai


> I'm currently inclined to go with 2).

Speaking entirely as a contributor, so am I. We should not be promulgating ISO nomes that don't match the actual charset content.

> TIS 620-2533 is from 1990
> (http://www.nectec.or.th/it-standards/std620/std620.htm), and doesn't 
> have the NBSP at 0xA0. However, the (formerly ECMA) registration at 
> http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ISO-IR/166.pdf which mentions TIS 620-2533 
> as the origin and the Thai Industrial Standards Institute as the 
> sponsor
> *does* have the NBSP at 0xA0, and gives a registration date of 13 July 
> 1992. So it seems that not only in practice, but also by standards 
> organizations, these two variants are treated pretty much as synonyms.

Exactly why I think 2 is the better option.

				Ned