- From: Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 11:31:15 +0100
- To: IANA <iana@icann.org>
- Cc: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>, ietf-charsets@iana.org
"IANA" wrote on 2001-08-23 23:25 UTC: > I'm in the process of registering this. > Is there an Alias for this new Character Set? I don't see a need for any aliases, but I don't object too strongly if you really want to add any for consistency with the registration of the other ISO 8859 parts. The other ISO 8859 parts have various amounts of aliases registered (mostly for no good reason I suspect), and the equivalents for ISO-8859-16 would probably be some or all of: Alias: iso-ir-226 Alias: ISO_8859-16:2001 Alias: ISO_8859-16 Alias: latin10 Alias: l10 In general, I believe that aliases are an evil thing and the fewer there are the better. Aliases should in my opinion only be used to handle inconsistent historic practice, but they should not be introduced for new charsets. The whole point of a registry is to have *single* exact unique names for objects and conventions after all. The aliases were ill conceived from the beginning. For instance: The existing ISO-IR-xxx aliases are technically wrong, because the ISO IR number refers only to the upper half (G1) of the 8-bit character set, not to the full charset. Some aliases that contain the year of publication are by now obsolete, because ISO has published the second edition of the older ISO 8859 parts. These are just some of the aspects why I think the aliases were a bad idea to start with. Also note that the capitalization in the registry is inconsistent. It says "iso-8859-14" but "ISO-8859-15". The entire thing probably deserves a cleanup. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
Received on Friday, 24 August 2001 06:31:38 UTC