[Bug 23646] "us-ascii" should not be an alias for "windows-1252"

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=23646

John C Klensin <john+w3cbugs@jck.com> changed:

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--- Comment #3 from John C Klensin <john+w3cbugs@jck.com> ---
Addison, I certainly agree that generating additional replacement characters is
a bad idea. 

But the argument that ASCII (and ISO 8859-1) are reasonable aliases for
"windows-1252" because the latter is a proper superset could also be used to
argue that ASCII is a reasonable alias for UTF-8 because UTF-8 is also a proper
superset.   If one then assumes transitivity of aliases, your suggestion that,
if one thinks something is ASCII and some octet is out of range then breaks
down because that out of range octet could be either Windows-1252 (or ISO
8859-1 if it is in the 0xA1 - 0xFF range) or part of a UTF-8 sequence.

The document itself is probably ok because of the way it separates single-byte
and multi-byte operations but, if an implementation gets even slightly sloppy
about terminology or labeling, it seems to me that those aliases help us get
onto rather thin ice.  For better or worse, such sloppy behavior appears
frequently on the Internet, probably most commonly induced by copying strings
from one document and pasting them into another.

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Received on Sunday, 27 October 2013 14:15:56 UTC