Re: Encoding: Referring people to a list of labels

Hì Richard,

Most of the cases of contemporary uses of legacy encodings I know of
involve encodings not registered with IANA.

Historical solutions are to just identify these encodings as iso-859-1 /
windows-1252

The tend to all be non-ASCII compatible encodings.

Andrew
On 25/01/2014 12:57 AM, "Richard Ishida" <ishida@w3.org> wrote:

> 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
>
>