[whatwg] Superset encodings [Re: ISO-8859-* and the C1 control range]

[Øistein E. Andersen]

Le 10 juin 09 à 09:06, Anne van Kesteren a écrit :

> It is about adding aliases. If the alias added is also a distinct  
> encoding conformance checkers are supposed to report on the  
> differences.

That probably has to be made more explicit, then.

> Personally I would be happy with making the aliases normative  
> everywhere but I suspect that is not going to fly. E.g. letting US- 
> ASCII always map to Windows-1252 would probably be highly  
> controversial.

That particular mapping may not actually be necessary (IE8 maps 8-bit  
US-ASCII to U+FFFD, and several previous versions of IE ignore the  
high bit), so making the other aliases normative still seems worth  
considering. There are a few aliases whose name starts with x-, though.

> I would prefer them being added to the IANA registry.

Sure.

>> It might be to useful to
>> include a set of MIME charset strings which cannot be or have not yet
>> been registered (e.g., x-x-big5, x-sjis, windows-932) as well as
>> information on how CJK character sets are implemented in practice,  
>> both
>> of which seem to be necessary for compatibility.
>
> Such information should definitely be included, yes.

In that case, it would probably be less confusing and more accurate to  
have one table mapping between encodings (or from preferred MIME name  
to encoding or something along those lines) and another table adding  
additional MIME charset strings.

> Since you seem to have studied this subject a lot, do you keep more  
> detailed information somewhere including tests, findings, tables,  
> etc? It would be very cool to have that.

Most of the relevant findings have been sent to the WhatWG list as  
part of the current thread. The following messages contain links to  
tables and tests:

<http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-March/014190.html 
 >
<http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2008-July/015455.html 
 >
<http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-April/019322.html 
 >

Some of the tables and tests may be difficult to interpret, so please  
feel free to ask if you have any questions.

-- 
Øistein E. Andersen