Re: CfC: Request transition of HTML5 to Candidate Recommendation

On Nov 25, 2012, at 4:28 PM, L. David Baron wrote:

> On Sunday 2012-11-25 15:18 -0800, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
>> On Nov 14, 2012, at 2:15 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:
>>> In accordance with both the W3C process's requirement to record the group's decision to request advancement[1], and with the steps identified in the "Plan 2014" CfC[2], this is a Call for Consensus (CfC) to request transition to CR for the following document:
>>> 
>>> http://htmlwg.org/cr/html/index.html
> [...]
>> This specification continues to use terminology and definitions
>> that are arbitrarily different from the other specifications of
>> Web architecture, resulting in needless argumentation in support
>> of willful violations that are really just a failure to use the
>> right terms at the right times.
>> 
>>  URL       --> reference
>>  resource  --> representation
>>  encoding  --> charset (or character encoding scheme)
> [...]
>> If the WG decides to advance the HTML5 specification to CR
>> without fixing these errors and inconsistencies, then please
>> consider this a formal objection.
> 
> I would (counter-)object to the proposed use of the term "charset"
> for a character encoding scheme.  The character set for the Web is
> the Universal Character Set (Unicode), and use of the term "charset"
> to describe encoding schemes leads to confusion.
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/REC-charmod-20050215/#C020 says:
>  # C020  [S]  Specifications SHOULD avoid using the terms
>  # 'character set' and 'charset' to refer to a character encoding,
>  # except when the latter is used to refer to the MIME charset
>  # parameter or its IANA-registered values. The term 'character
>  # encoding', or in specific cases the terms 'character encoding
>  # form' or 'character encoding scheme', are RECOMMENDED. 

Please see RFC6365: "http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6365"
"charset" does not mean character set.

I personally prefer character encoding, but charset is
technically more accurate (as defined) because of charsets
that do inline swaps of CES.  I don't know what the status
of charmod is now, post-RFC6365, but I'd be happy with either
being used consistently.  Just encoding, OTOH, is insufficient
to distinguish the multitude of encodings used in and around
HTML (pct-encoding, www-url-encoded-form, content-encoding, etc.).

....Roy

Received on Monday, 26 November 2012 00:45:18 UTC