- From: Martin J. Dürst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>
- Date: Wed, 02 Jul 2014 20:14:38 +0900
- To: "www-international@w3.org" <www-international@w3.org>
This is a Last Call comment on http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-encoding-20140603/. I wonder whether the WG has considered the chances of deployment in particular for the actual encoding conversion definitions. Based on about 20 years of experience, my understanding of why e.g. the IANA charset registry does such a bad job, and why e.g. the Unicode Consortium never published 'normative' conversion tables, is that implementers from libraries to programming languages to databases to networking and communication software are extremely conservative with changing definitions of encoding conversions. The reason for this is that nobody wants things to break that worked before, for whatever definition of 'work'. There is a strong possibility that this extends to browsers, the major targets of this spec. Some browser makers also have their encoding conversion libraries tied to uses in other software and will therefore be even more conservative. The WG should be well advised to consider the above points, and how they affect the chance to pass CR. Regards, Martin.
Received on Wednesday, 2 July 2014 11:16:04 UTC