On Mon, 12 Oct 2009, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote: > > My understanding, from what I learned from Ian, is that HTML5 tries to > make it easier to write a browser, without doing reverse-engineering. > But the problem with the current "western demographic" wording is that > browser implementers will have to re-engineer that term. As Leif > explains in quite some detail, the definition is indeed quite circular: > iso-8859-1 was designed for the iron curtain period Western Europe (with > some limitations), and windows-1252 follows that that. But the term > "Western" has many meanings, and is used much more differenciated these > days, and languages completely unrelated to Western Europe (Kurdish, > Swahili) use iso-8859-1 just because they fit in (and quite some more > languages for windows-1252). I agree that we shouldn't mention Europe (and we don't), but I'm not sure what term would be better than "Western". It seems to be a pretty good fit based on Wikipedia's map: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world Certainly not perfect, but I'm not sure what would be better without going into extreme detail and listing specific countries. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Monday, 12 October 2009 05:47:14 UTC