Re: [wmvs] do we still need charset.cfg to list the "acceptable" character encodings?

link@pobox.com (Terje Bless) wrote:

>ot@w3.org (olivier Thereaux) wrote:
>
>>Sounds reasonable, but what's the policy? And where does it come from?
>
>The policy is that nothing that's not registered with IANA will be
>accepted, and it comes from me. :-)

To elaborate somewhat[0];

charset.cfg is an implementation artifact and reflects limited tools.

The planned “ideal” way for this to work was that 
charset.cfg be replaced with the actual IANA registry[1] such 
that what we whitelist is not what we happen to have had time to 
find and stuff in a config file, but what's actually registered.

The IANA registry contains information on preferred MIME name 
etc. based on which we could emit warnings for non-preferred names.

Whether an unregistered encoding is a fatal error or a warning 
is debateable.

A “charset.cfg” may still be needed, but then only for 
“exception” purposes such as bitching about vendor-specific 
charsets or usage boo boos (the -I variants and some Thai 
encodings, IIRC).



[0] — See <http://swhack.com/logs/2007-05-24#T07-12-02>.

[1] — Literally by parsing
       <http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets>
       instead of “charset.cfg”.

-- 
I have lobbied for the update and improvement of SGML. I've done 
it for years.
I consider it the jewel for which XML is a setting.  It does 
deserve a bit of
polishing now and then.                                        
-- Len Bullard

Received on Thursday, 24 May 2007 07:40:21 UTC