Re: latin1 decoder implementation

From: Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr>
Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2012 01:56:51 +0100

True. HTML5 makes its own reinterpretation of the IETF's MIME standard,
definining it own protocol (which means that it is no longer fully
compatible with MIME and its IANA datatabase, because the mapping of the
value of a charset="" pseudo-attribute is not directly to the IETF MIME
standard, but to a newer range of W3C standards).

There was a clear desire from the W3C to deprecate the use of the MIME
standard and its IANA database in HTML, to simplify the implementations
(also to avoid the many incompatibilities that have occured in the past
with MIME charsets between the implementations). Note also that the W3C
does not automatically endorses the Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646 standards as
well (there's a delay before accepting newer releases of TUS and ISO/IEC
10646, and the W3C frequently adds now several restrictions).

2012/11/17 Doug Ewell <doug_at_ewellic.org>

> If he is targeting HTML5, then none of this matters, because HTML5 says
> that ISO 8859-1 is really Windows-1252.
>
> For example, there is no C1 control called NL in Windows-1252. There is
> only 0x85, which maps to U+2026 HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS.
>
>
> --
> Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA
> http://www.ewellic.org | @DougEwell ­
>
>
> From: Philippe Verdy
> Sent: Friday, November 16, 2012 17:35
> To: Whistler, Ken
> Cc: Buck Golemon ; unicode_at_unicode.org
>
> Subject: Re: latin1 decoder implementation
>
>
> In fact not really, because Unicode DOES assign more precise semantics to
> a few of these controls, notably for those given whitespace and newline
> properties (notably TAB, LF, CR in C0 controls and NL in C1 controls, with
> a few additional constraints for the CR+LF sequence) as they are part of
> almost all plain text protocols ; NUL also has a specific behavior which is
> so common that it cannot be mapped to anything else than a terminator or
> separator of plain text sequences.
>
> So even if the ISO/IEC 8859 standard does not specify a charecter mapping
> in C0 and C1 controls, the registered MIME types are doing so (but nothing
> is well defined for the C0 and C1 controls except NUL, TAB, CR, LF, NL, for
> MIME usages purpose).
>
> And then yes, the ISO/IEC 8859 standard is different (more restrictive)
> from the MIME charsets defined by the IETF in some RFC's (and registered in
> the IANA registry), simply because the ISO/IEC standard (encoded charset)
> was developed to be compatible with various encoding schemes, some of them
> defined by ISO, some others defined by other standard European or
> East-Asian bodies (including 7-bit schemes, using escape sequences, or
> shift in/out controls).
>
> By itself, the ISO/IEC 8859 is not a complete encoding scheme, it is just
> defining several encoded character sets, independantly of the encoding
> schme used to store or transport it (it is not even sufficient to represent
> any plain-text content).
>
> On the opposite, The MIME "charsets" named "ISO_8859-*" registered by the
> IETF in the IANA registry are "concrete" encoding schemes, based on the
> ISO/IEC 8859 standard, and suitable for representing a plain-text content,
> because the MIME charsets are also adding a text presentation protocol.
>
> In practice, almost nobody today uses the ISO/IEC 8859 standard alone :
> there's always an additional concrete protocol added on top of it (which
> generally makes use of the C0 and C1 controls, but not necessarily, and not
> always the same way). So plain-text documents never use the ISO/IEC 8859
> standard, but the MIME charsets (plus a few specific or proprietary
> charsets that have not been registered in the IANA registry as they are
> bound to a non-open protocol).
>
>
Received on Fri Nov 16 2012 - 18:57:58 CST

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