Re: Proposal to deprecate 'Character encodings' article

--On Friday, January 22, 2016 4:37 PM +0000 ishida@w3.org wrote:

> Someone recently pointed out that the article entitled
> "Character encodings" at
> https://www.w3.org/International/O-charset
> is significantly out of date.
> 
> It doesn't put enough emphasis on the use of UTF-8, it doesn't
> show the HTML5 meta charset markup, references to XHTML can be
> removed, it points to the IANA registry rather than the
> Encoding spec, it says that ISO 8859-1 is a preferred
> encoding, etc.  Furthermore, the content is mostly covered
> elsewhere, in more recent articles.
>...

Richard,

I think explicitly deprecating that document as outdated is a
fine idea (and, in retrospect, probably overdue).

However (and while it is probably part of a separate
discussion), I'm still anxious about having two separate
registries -- at IANA and in the Encoding spec.  We went to
great lengths to make what are now called media types the same
for the web, email, and everything else.  Separate lists for
character encoding identifiers (seen from the IETF and email
perspective as part of the media type picture) really benefits
no one.   Perhaps the solution is to point out the confusion we
have gotten into and see it as another reason for moving to
Unicode encoded in UTF-8, but I'm not sure that is a good reason
for encouraging worse confusion in the interim.

   john

Received on Friday, 22 January 2016 19:00:12 UTC