Re: Proposal to deprecate 'Character encodings' article

On 2016/01/23 03:59, John C Klensin wrote:

> I think explicitly deprecating that document as outdated is a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.

I agree with John.

I see the Encoding spec primarily as a document that gives more specific 
definitions for edge cases and some limitations on the legacy encodings 
expected to be supported, in the context of the "Web Platform" (i.e. 
mostly Web Browser implementations), motivated by security and 
uniformity concerns that apply very much in that context but not 
necessarily in other contexts where encodings are used.

It would be very good if the Encoding spec said so (although hopefully 
in more, shorter sentences :-().

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Saturday, 23 January 2016 10:04:35 UTC