RE: Response to [encoding document review request]

[+ public-i18n-core@]

Hi Mark,

Thank you for this feedback and thanks to the UTC for reviewing the encoding document. As you know, the I18N Core WG is in the process of rechartering and one of our deliverables might include this document. Hopefully we can address the concerns expressed by the UTC in future revisions.

Thanks,

Addison

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect (Lab126)
Chair (W3C I18N WG)

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.



From: mark.edward.davis@gmail.com [mailto:mark.edward.davis@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Mark Davis ?
Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2012 9:17 AM
To: Phillips, Addison
Cc: ishida@w3.org
Subject: Re: Response to

Addison,

The UTC reviewed the document W3C Encoding (Living Specification — Last Updated 4 May 2012), and has the following feedback:

In general, the reception was not positive.

1. The committee doesn't see the value of having additional definitions for Unicode encoding forms, forms that just have the possibility of being out of sync.

2. The pseudo-code is *much* harder to evaluate than any of:
(a) defining a general mechanism driven by tables (such as UTS 22), or
(b) actual code that can be tested, or
(c) citing those specs that are well defined.

3. In reference to the following text:

> This specification attempts to fill those gaps so that new implementations do not have to reverse engineer encoding
> implementations of the market leaders and existing implementations can become more interoperable.

Overall, the proportion of legacy content is diminishing quickly.

As far as new implementations go, and the demand for this is unclear, since new implementations are not appearing with any frequency.
For existing implementations, there is the general feeling that companies will not change their existing transcoders to match this spec; it is too much work for legacy encodings, and would be incompatible changes without great benefit.