Proposal for additional Aliases to IANA registry of character sets

To:   RFC 2978 - IANA  character set registration review list

      Character Set Reviewer, IANA



A proposal for adding several aliases of the form IBM-xxxxx  to the current
IANA registry at http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets follows
this note.   The justification is included in the proposal.  Per RFC 2978
this is being sent for a two week comment period to the ietf-charset list.

If there are any questions or clarifications needed please contact myself
or Nancy (see contact info at the end of this proposal).


V.S. (Uma) Umamaheswaran, Ph.D. ,
IBM Standards Projects Authority for SIRS030 - Coded Character Sets
Globalization Centre of Competency,  IBM Canada Lab, 8200 Warden Avenue,
B3/979, Markham, Ontario,  L6G 1C7
Ph: +1 905-413-3474 (Tie 969); Fax:905 413 4903; Internet:
umavs@ca.ibm.com; Notes: umavs@ibmca; VM: umavs@torolab2

==========================

Proposal for Addition of New Alias Names to Existing Iana Registered
Character Sets

Introduction:

There are currently has 54 entries identifying IBM's character sets  in the
IANA Character Set Registry with names in the form  IBMxxx, where xxx is
the IBM code page id.  In addition to these entries, there are two IBMxxx
aliases in the IANA Registry.  We have found that a number of software
products use the format IBM-xxx to support the IBM codes.  This has become
an issue when products that base their support  on IANA registered names
and aliases receive data tagged in the IBM-xxx format.  The tag is not
recognized and an error results.

Proposed Resolution:

For each registered character set with a name (or alias) in the form
IBMxxx add an alias name of the form IBM-xxx.  See the specific list
included below in the Detail section.

Justification:

We are requesting the addition of these aliases, because the use of names
that includes the dash is prevalent, e.g., a number of software tools
support the dash spelling. As a result, we have a body of XML documents
that include encoding declarations for the dash variants, without XML
processor support for these documents.

Here are some examples of the use of the dash aliases:
Sun Solaris iconv:
http://www.sun.com/developers/gadc/technicalpublications/whitepapers/solunicosuppt.pdf?redirect=false

See page 32

IBM AIX iconv:
http://publibn.boulder.ibm.com/doc_link/en_US/a_doc_lib/aixprggd/genprogc/genprogc02.htm
See Appendix A, IBM Code Sets

IBM DB2 XML:
http://www.ibm.com/software/data/db2/os390/pdf2/v7/dxxxa710.pdf
See Appendix C, table 64, page 255


OS/390 reference:
http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com:80/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/CBCPG120/7.6.4
See section 7.6.4 Code Set Converters Supplied, Table 76.


Detail

Existing Iana           Proposed Alias
Name              Name
IBM037                  IBM-37
IBM038                  IBM-38
IBM273                  IBM-273
IBM274                  IBM-274
IBM275                  IBM-275
IBM277                  IBM-277
IBM278                  IBM-278
IBM280                  IBM-280
IBM281                  IBM-281
IBM284                  IBM-284
IBM285                  IBM-285
IBM290                  IBM-290
IBM297                  IBM-297
IBM420                  IBM-420
IBM423                  IBM-423
IBM424                  IBM-424
IBM437                  IBM-437
IBM500                  IBM-500
IBM775                  IBM-775
IBM850                  IBM-850
IBM851                  IBM-851
IBM852                  IBM-852
IBM855                  IBM-855
IBM857                  IBM-857
IBM860                  IBM-860
IBM861                  IBM-861
IBM862                  IBM-862
IBM863                  IBM-863
IBM864                  IBM-864
IBM865                  IBM-865
IBM866                  IBM-866
IBM868                  IBM-868
IBM869                  IBM-869
IBM870                  IBM-870
IBM871                  IBM-871
IBM880                  IBM-880
IBM891                  IBM-891
IBM903                  IBM-903
IBM904                  IBM-904
IBM905                  IBM-905
IBM918                  IBM-918
IBM1026                 IBM-1026
IBM00858                IBM-858
IBM00924                IBM-924
IBM01140                IBM-1140
IBM01141                IBM-1141
IBM01142                IBM-1142
IBM01143                IBM-1143
IBM01144                IBM-1144
IBM01145                IBM-1145
IBM01146                IBM-1146
IBM01147                IBM-1147
IBM01148                IBM-1148
IBM01149                IBM-1149

Existing Iana           Existing  Alias   Proposed Alias
Name              Name              Name
ISO_8859-1:1987   IBM819                  IBM-819
ANSI_X3.4-1968    IBM367                  IBM-367



Contact Information:

For additional information on this proposal contact:

Nancy  MacIver
Globalization Center of Competency, Toronto
Phone 905-413-3735  tie 969-3735
e-mail  nancymac@ca.ibm.com

OR

V.S. UMAmaheswaran, IBM SPA for SIRS-030 - Coded Character Sets
Globalization Center of Competency, Toronto
Phone 905-413-3474 TL 969-3474
e-mail:  umavs@ca.ibm.com

Received on Saturday, 3 August 2002 19:21:28 UTC