Re: Charsets + encoding + codesets

From: Yung-Fong Tang (ftang@netscape.com)
Date: Thu Oct 09 1997 - 13:41:14 EDT


Kenneth Whistler wrote:

> Martin asked, in response to my example of what I would
> like to see in a consistent registry of encoded character
> sets:
>
> > Where did you get your short tags from? The largest and most widely
> > used collection of tags in this area is the IANA "charset" registry.
>
> > at least three of four of your short tags are wrong in this respect;
>
> > it is iso-8859-1, utf-8, and utf-16.
>
> I made them up. The whole point was to have a *short*, consistently
> constructed tag for identification purposes within this table,
> rather than that IANA tag, for several reasons:
>
>   1. This is an excerpt from a large spreadsheet of such things,
>      and many entries in the table do not have an IANA registry--
>      thus do not have an IANA tag.
>
>   2. The IANA tags are whatever they got registered as, which means
>      they are not consistently generated, and are not always
> short.
>      (My fave is: "Extended_UNIX_Code_Packed_Format_for_Japanese",
>
>      but I also dislike the years appended to all the 8859 parts:
>      "ISO_8859-9:1989", etc. MIME substitutes "ISO-8859-9".)

Have you find there are some alias (or name) label as "(preferred MIME
name)" in the IANA file ?

>  
>
> Think of the short tags as another set of aliases for the IANA
> registry, if you will.
>
> I am not suggesting that anybody start using yet another set of tags
> in a context where the IANA "charset" tags are specified. By all
> means,
> if using a standard that refers to the IANA "charset" values, use the
> correct tags as defined there.
>
> --Ken

  





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