RE: Encoding: Referring people to a list of labels

how do I get out of this spam engine? Any thoughts?

Best Regards, 
Khurram Ilyas 

 
 
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2014 08:23:36 +1100
From: lang.support@gmail.com
To: ishida@w3.org
CC: www-international@w3.org
Subject: 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