Encoding: Referring people to a list of labels

Anne, Joshua,

I'm in the process of rewriting an article about character encodings and 
CSS.  The current version of the article says that, if you for some 
reason don't use UTF-8 and need to use @charset, you should refer to the 
IANA list of encodings and choose the preferred label for the encoding 
you need.

(I know, I know... people would be better off using UTF-8, and will 
certainly recommend that, but we also want to document what to do in 
situations where you have to deal with legacy encodings.)

I'm thinking that we should be pointing them to the Encoding spec, 
rather than the IANA list.

We could point at http://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/#concept-encoding-get, 
although there are two issues with that:

1. that table isn't really intended to provide a list of labels people 
should use, it maps labels to encodings

2. the most commonly used label for an encoding, where there are more 
than one per encoding, is generally not at the top of the list (although 
it is used for the name of the encoding).

Questions:

Do you agree that it would be useful to be able to point people to a 
list of encoding labels that they should use for legacy or special 
situations?

Should that list be in the Encoding spec?

Should we make a separate list, or can we adapt/annotate the list at 
http://encoding.spec.whatwg.org/#concept-encoding-get to serve that purpose?

RI

Received on Friday, 24 January 2014 13:56:04 UTC