Encoding support policy

Hi,

  We need a clear policy about which charset names and which encodings
we support. The current charset.cfg lists acceptable names and check
takes care that if the Encode installation support the encoding, the
names will be recognized. The current list appears to be a bit random 
though we probably need at least an exclusion list since we don't want
people to use encodings like "guess" which are supported by Encode.

I think the policy should be as follows. We support any encoding the
system's Encode installation does support and for which we know a
proper Encode alias which is not specifically excluded from the list
of encodings. We get those alias definitions from I18N::Charset and
for charset names that are not registered with IANA we emit a warning,
possibly including a hint which encoding should be used instead.

This would require some updates to I18N::Charset, I'll ask Martin
about that. This will probably also require keeping track of encodings
which Encode does not support by default, e.g. gb18030 requires that
Encode::HanExtra is installed, so we would need a list for v.w3.org
to ensure that it supports the modules we want to support.

regards,
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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Received on Thursday, 18 August 2005 19:11:04 UTC