On 19 Oct 2009, at 05:52, Ian Hickson wrote:
I've noted your e-mail here [...] and moved the whole thing out of
the spec.
That does not seem to apply to the last part of the original e-mail,
quoted below.
Øistein E. Andersen
Other character encoding issues:
--------------------------------
ASCII-compatibility:
The note in ‘2.1.5 Character encodings’ seems to say that ‘variants
of ISO-2022’ (presumably including common ones like ISO-2022-CN,
ISO-2022KR and ISO-2022-JP) are ASCII-compatible, whereas HZ-GB-2312
is not, and I cannot find anything in Section 2.1.5 that would
explain this difference.
Discouraged encodings:
‘4.2.5.5 Specifying the document's character encoding’ advises
against certain encodings. (Incidentally, this advice probably
deserves not to be ‘hidden’ in a section nominally reserved for
character encoding *declaration* issues.) In particular:
Authors should not use JIS-X-0208 (JIS_C6226-1983), JIS-X-0212
(JIS_X0212-1990), encodings based on ISO-2022, and encodings based
on EBCDIC.
It is not clear what this means (e.g., the character set
JIS_C6226-1983 in any encoding, or only when encoded alone according
to RFC1345 as described above); the list of discouraged encodings
seems conspicuously short if it is supposed to be complete; and the
lack of rationale makes it difficult to understand why these
encodings are considered particularly harmful (JIS_C6226-1983 v.
JIS_C6226-1978 or ISO-2022 v. HZ, to mention but two at least
initially puzzling cases). It might be better to say *why*
particular encodings are better avoided, whether or not the list of
discouraged encodings be presented as definitive.
Minor grammar detail in 4.2.5.5:
Conformance checkers may advise against authors using legacy
encodings.
This is ambiguous. It should probably be ‘advise against authors’
using legacy encodings’ or better ‘advise authors against using
legacy encodings’.
