Encoding document approach [I18N-ACTION-117]

All,

Following is a draft addressing named action item. Any comments?

Addison

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All,

In our last teleconference I was tasked [1] with sending a note discussing the approach that the encoding document [2] it taking and the Internationalization Core WG's "temperature" on this work.

The working group is generally supportive of the idea of documenting the handling of legacy character encodings and appreciates the work completed so far. Indeed, the WG would be happy to host publication and advancement of the document, provided our charter is amended to allow us to publish on the REC track.

Some concerns have been expressed about the approach the document takes. There are two main ones that we think should be addressed in the short term:

1. The document describes various character encoding schemes without placing, we feel, the correct emphasis on migrating from legacy encodings to Unicode. More attention should be paid to this and to leveraging CharMod [3].

The above is fairly minor. A more impactful concern is:

2. The document proceeds from observations of how character encodings *appear* to be handled in various browsers/user-agents. Implementers may find this documentation useful, but several important user-agents are thought to be implemented in ways that are divergent from this document. We think that more direct information about character encoding conversion from implementers should be sought to form the description of various encoders/decoders.

We hope to see advancement of this document in the near future.

Yours/etc.

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect (Lab126)
Chair (W3C I18N WG)

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.

Received on Sunday, 22 April 2012 20:40:43 UTC