Re: [Encoding] false statement

On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 12:02 PM, John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org> wrote:

> Anne van Kesteren scripsit:
>
> > # Historically many encodings had their names and labels (and sometimes
> > # references to specifications) defined in the IANA Character Sets
> > # registry.  This specification supplants that registry.
>
> You are unsurprisingly[*] continuing to miss the point.  The issue is not
> whether you say "supplants" or "makes obsolete", which are effectively
> synonymous, but that you clarify the scope of the claim.  Wider concerns
> exist than the behavior of a few Web browsers, and it is inappropriate,
> to say the least, to use absolute language more fitted to the laws of
> physics when describing what they do or should do.
>
>
Along the lines of the clarification Henri makes in
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=23646#c36 it seems that the
spec should be explicit that it describes the use of text encodings for the
Web platform. The HTML spec itself uses the phrase "This specification
defines a big part of the Web platform..." in the introduction.

How about:

>>>
While encodings have been defined by many diverse standards,
implementations of the Web platform (i.e. Web browsers) have not always
implemented them in the same way, have not always used the same labels, and
often differ in dealing with undefined and former proprietary areas of
encodings. This specification attempts to fill those gaps so that new Web
platform implementations do not have to reverse engineer encoding
implementations of the market leaders and existing implementations can
converge.

In particular, this specification defines the encodings, their algorithms
to go from bytes to code points and back, and their canonical names and
identifying labels for the Web platform. This specification also defines an
API to expose part of the encoding algorithms to JavaScript for the Web
platform.

Historically encodings and their specifications (if any) were kept track of
by the IANA Character Sets registry. This specification supplants the use
of that registry for the Web platform.
<<<

That repeats "Web platform" what seems an excessive number of times, but I
believe it's important; I have a (poorly maintained) polyfill for the JS
API and get frequent requests from non-Web platform users (i.e. the Node.js
community) to make changes that are not aligned with the spec and have had
to clarify the purpose and scope of the polyfill.


> [*] I say it isn't surprising based on a _mot_ of Upton Sinclair's:
> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary
> [or his status] depends upon his not understanding it!"
>
>
What, the Internet isn't synonymous with the World Wide Web? What madness
is this? :)


> --
> John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
> Let's face it: software is crap. Feature-laden and bloated, written under
> tremendous time-pressure, often by incapable coders, using dangerous
> languages and inadequate tools, trying to connect to heaps of broken or
> obsolete protocols, implemented equally insufficiently, running on
> unpredictable hardware -- we are all more than used to brokenness.
>                    --Felix Winkelmann
>
>