IANA registers one type of objects, namely character sets, in
two different name spaces. There is a group of character sets
registered under the heading "MIME TYPES", subheading "Character
Sets", on pages 77 and 78 in RFC 1340, and another group of
character sets under its own heading "CHARACTER SETS" on pages
79-82.
The same character set usually has different names in the two
groups. For example US-ASCII in the first group is the same as
ANSI_X3.4-1968 in the second and ISO-8859-1 in the first is the
same as ISO_8859-1:1987 in the second.
The current handling of character set registration is bound to
cause misunderstandings.
1) What is the reason for the double registration of character
sets?
2) What is the purpose of the second group of character set
names?
3) Will this purpose be clearly stated in the successor to RFC
1340? (That may counteract the widely spread misconception
that the names in the second group can be used in MIME.)
4) Why has not the names of character sets occuring in both
gropus been harmonized (or even better made equal)?
5) How does IANA ascertain that the same name is not allocated
to one character set in the first group of character set
names and to another in the second group?
--
Olle Jarnefors Internet:
ojarnef(_at_)admin(_dot_)kth(_dot_)se
Information Management Services UUCP: ...!uunet!mcsun!sunic!kth!ojarnef
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