ISSUE-373: Chances of deployment

Chances of deployment

State:

CLOSED

Product:

encoding

Raised by:

Addison Phillips

Opened on:

2014-07-10

Description:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-international/2014JulSep/0028.html

Comment from Martin Duerst:

This is a Last Call comment on
http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-encoding-20140603/.

I wonder whether the WG has considered the chances of deployment in
particular for the actual encoding conversion definitions.

Based on about 20 years of experience, my understanding of why e.g. the
IANA charset registry does such a bad job, and why e.g. the Unicode
Consortium never published 'normative' conversion tables, is that
implementers from libraries to programming languages to databases to
networking and communication software are extremely conservative with
changing definitions of encoding conversions. The reason for this is
that nobody wants things to break that worked before, for whatever
definition of 'work'.

There is a strong possibility that this extends to browsers, the major
targets of this spec. Some browser makers also have their encoding
conversion libraries tied to uses in other software and will therefore
be even more conservative.

The WG should be well advised to consider the above points, and how they
affect the chance to pass CR.

Related Actions Items:

No related actions

Related emails:

1. [minutes] Internationalization telecon 2014-08-28 (from ishida@w3.org on 2014-08-29)
2. Re: [Encoding] WG response on: Chances of deployment [I18N-ISSUE-373] (from duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp on 2014-08-21)
3. [Encoding] WG response on: Chances of deployment [I18N-ISSUE-373] (from addison@lab126.com on 2014-08-20)
4. [minutes] Internationalization telecon 2014-07-24 (from ishida@w3.org on 2014-07-24)
5. I18N-ISSUE-373: Changes of deployment [encoding] (from sysbot+tracker@w3.org on 2014-07-10)

Related notes:

Display change log