[Bug 11423] Character sets not registered with IANA

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=11423

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com

--- Comment #1 from Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com> 2010-11-28 19:16:41 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #0)
> HTML5 should not be encouraging
> people to use a character set that the creator has not even bothered to
> register with IANA.

It doesn't.

"Authors are encouraged to use UTF-8. Conformance checkers may advise authors
against using legacy encodings."

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/semantics.html#character-encoding-declaration

I suspect that "valid character encoding name" is supposed to require listing
in the IANA registry, so declaring windows-949 may not even be conforming even
though applying windows-949 is required for backwards compatibility.

> It's not like registering a character set with IANA is a particularly difficult or drawn-out process …

And yet Microsoft's attempt to do so (back in 2005) seems to have failed:

http://mail.apps.ietf.org/ietf/charsets/msg01510.html

> Furthermore, the next sections states that "User agents must support the
> preferred MIME name of every character encoding they support, and should
> support all the IANA-registered names and aliases of every character encoding
> they support."  It is obviously impossible to comply with this, since
> windows-949 does not have a preferred MIME name, due to its lack of
> registration with IANA.

It's trivial to comply with this, since "preferred MIME name" is defined by the
spec as "the name or alias labeled as 'preferred MIME name' in the IANA
Character Sets registry, if there is one, or the encoding's name, if none of
the aliases are so labeled". The name of windows-949 is "windows-949".

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/infrastructure.html#preferred-mime-name

Moreover, UAs aren't even required to support Windows-949:

"User agents must at a minimum support the UTF-8 and Windows-1252 encodings,
but may support more."

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/parsing.html#character-encodings-0

> I must therefore object to suggesting or encouraging the use of windows-949
> until it has been registered appropriately with IANA.

Maybe try registering it? Perhaps you'll have better luck than Microsoft.

-- 
Configure bugmail: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/userprefs.cgi?tab=email
------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are the QA contact for the bug.

Received on Sunday, 28 November 2010 19:16:43 UTC