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

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

--- Comment #5 from John C Klensin <john+w3cbugs@jck.com> ---
Addison,

This all sounds reasonable.  Especially given the tendency for folks with other
applications to try to generalize from web specs because the web is so popular
and familiar to users, I think it suggests that the document would be
considerably improved by some introductory text that stresses the limited
applicability (could go in the preface or in Section 4 before the table) and
what "alias" actually means in that table (either before the table or in an
appropriate note).

"Encoding names that can usually be considered equivalent for rendering HTML
web pages" would probably do the latter job although you or Anne can probably
come up with something better.

FWIW, we should also probably try to get "US-ASCII" out of our preferred
terminology repertoire.  It results, AFAIK, for some misunderstandings around
the IETF and elsewhere 20-odd years ago.  The name of the relevant standard,
repertoire, and coding system is "ASCII" ("American Standards Code for
Information Interchange"), named back when ANSI's name was still "American
Standards Association" or "ASA".  "US-ASCII" would be justified if there were,
e.g., "CA-ASCII", "MX-ASCII", "BR-ASCII", etc., but there aren't.  "EU-ASCII",
"JP-ASCII", or "ISO-ASCII" don't exist either and would be oxymorons if they
did.  No problem with the document --listing it as a non-preferred synonym for
"ASCII" is fine -- but I note that this discussion has used it as if it were
the preferred and most precise form.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are on the CC list for the bug.

Received on Monday, 28 October 2013 11:51:17 UTC