Dear Nick,
On Wed, 09 Oct 2002, 09:35 GMT+01 (10:35 local time) Nick Ing-Simmons
wrote:
I agree that perl should accept all the IANA names.
As for the default names _I_ decided to use MIME name as prefered name
when it existed - they seemed to be more "usable" (less embedded or at
least more systematic-looking punctuation, more familiar from e-mail
and HTTP headers etc.) We can revisit that if people think it would
help.
Yes, I also think that the MIME names, if existing, are prefered. But,
continuing my example of 'shiftjis' used as default name by Encode,
this is not true. If you watch the entry of MIBenum 17 at
http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets
its preferred MIME name is 'Shift_JIS'. If there is a name marked as
'preferred MIME name' by IANA, this name is the recommended one. This
also meets the W3C guidelines. W3C also recommends to use them all in
lowercase. Since they are case insensitive, I don't see any advantage
in not using them in all lowercase. The only allowed aliases for
shift_jis approved by IANA are 'MS_Kanji' and 'csShiftJIS', but not
'shiftjis'.
Another example where Perl meets IANA's convention as well as their
'preferred MIME name' is MIBenum 4 which official name is
'ISO_8859-1:1987' but the preferred MIME name is the alias
'ISO-8859-1'. I would find it useful if Encode would be revised to
know all names listed in the IANA list mentioned and default to their
preferred MIME names, all in lowercase. Maybe the unique ID number
("MIBenum") could also be taken into account.
best,
rob.
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