Re: Charset "iso-10646-1"

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On 29.08.01 at 16:19, Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org> wrote:

>I'm a bit confused. The place you cite does reference [ISO10646], but it
>does not contain any syntax examples. The actual syntax is given in
>Section 5, http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html, but this does
>not contain the label iso-10646-1 at all.
>
>Also, the IANA registry at http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets
>does not contain iso-10646-1.
>
>I wonder where you came up with iso-10646-1.

It's a common misconception. Character Encoding issues are _hard_ and most
people don't understand them. Since the ISO-8859-* series has been well
worked into the collective subsconscious, if a spec uses a similar looking
string (such as "ISO-10646") anywhere in relation to charset issues, a lot
of people will immediately assume it is a charset name in the same vein as
the ISO-8859-* encodings. This has cropped up periodically and should
probably be mentioned to the HTML WG; a small explanatory note,
strategically placed, could avoid a lot of confusion.