[Bug 26693] Edit for the 'Encoding false statement' thread

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=26693

Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@hsivonen.fi> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |hsivonen@hsivonen.fi

--- Comment #16 from Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@hsivonen.fi> ---
Trying my luck painting this bikeshed, I suggest:

"
Unicode is the coded character set for the Web and, of the encodings that can
represent all of Unicode, UTF-8 is the most appropriate one for interchange.
This specification turns the use of UTF-8 as the interchange encoding into a
requirement for new protocols and formats, as well as existing formats deployed
in new contexts.

There are other (legacy) encodings and while they have been defined to some
extent, implementations 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 implementations do not have to reverse engineer encoding
implementations of the market leaders and existing implementations can
converge.

In particular, this specification defines all the encodings, their algorithms
to go from bytes to scalar values and back, and their canonical names and
identifying labels. This specification also defines an API to expose part of
the encoding algorithms to JavaScript.

Implementations have significantly deviated from the labels listed in the IANA
Character Sets registry. Combined with the desire to stop legacy encodings from
spreading further, this specification is exhaustive about the aforementioned
details and thereby renders the registry obsolete when adhering to this
specification. In particular, this specification intentionally does not provide
a mechanism for extending the set of encodings or the set of labels.
"

("obsolete when adhering to this specification" is pretty much a circular
statement, but I suggest using slightly more weasely words if that allows a
more productive focus on what the spec actually defines.)

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Received on Thursday, 4 September 2014 09:40:31 UTC