Re: [Encoding] false statement [I18N-ACTION-328][I18N-ISSUE-374]

John C Klensin scripsit:

> Things like using a Windows code page in place of ASCII (the
> "us-ascii" charset registration) doesn't fit those criteria -- it is a
> simple decision to deviate, whether for good reasons or not.

Which is why the IANA registry does not serve the purposes of browsers,
which are beiunskys and effectively dictate the behavior of servers,
authors and their tools, and the rest of the Web.

> I think it also leads to a question that I consider legitimate,
> which is why we would expect conformance to the Encoding spec to be
> significantly better than conformance to the IANA Charset registry
> definitions.  It is not clear to me that either is less ambiguous than
> the other.

Because IETF specs reflect what Internet participants should or must do
for interoperability and mean what they say (within the limits of the
canons of interpretation), whereas WHATWG specs reflect what browsers
actually do and mean what the browser makers say they mean.

> I believe that folks who have need for writing systems not supported
> by Unicode should sort that out with Unicode.  Patience may be hard,
> but future interoperability and compatibility problems are likely to
> be much worse.

Emphatic -1.  People will and should participate in the Web in their
native languages, even if that requires presenting text as images
(either as block prints or as movable type) to get the job done.
Unicode grinds very slowly, and rightly so considering how hard it is to
fix mistakes in it.  Font-kludge encodings are bad for interoperability,
but it's possible to work around them, whereas there is no workaround
for lacking publishing access to the Web.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
We pledge allegiance to the penguin and to the intellectual property
regime for which he stands, one world under Linux, with free music
and open source software for all.  --Julian Dibbell on Brazil, edited

Received on Sunday, 31 August 2014 20:36:39 UTC