Re: [Encoding] false statement [I18N-ACTION-328][I18N-ISSUE-374]

John C Klensin scripsit:

> it is also noteworthy that the number of web
> browsers, or even web servers, in use is fairly small.  By
> contrast, the number of SMTP clients and servers, including
> independently-developed submission clients built into embedded
> devices, is huge and the number of mail user agents even larger.

Very true.  But the number of web pages reduces all the distinct
Internet software programs in the world to nothing at all.

> So an instruction from the IETF (or W3C or some other entity) to
> those email systems to abandon the IANA Registry's definitions
> in favor of some other norm would, pragmatically, be likely to
> make things worse rather than better, 

+1

> To a considerable extent, that means I see the Encoding document
> as institutionalizing the problem.  

That's pretty much what has already happened with respect to the SGML
definition of HTML.  The Web is its own world separate from SGML, and
it needs and has gotten its own markup definition.

> Sure.  But that and scale measured in numbers of deployed
> independent implementations and the difficulties associated with
> changing them, would seem to argue strongly for at least mostly
> changing the web browsers to conform to what is in the IANA
> registry (possibly there are Registry entries that might need
> tuning too --the IETF Charset procedures don't allow that at
> present but, at you point out, they could, at least in
> principle, be changed) rather than trying to retune the Internet
> to match what a handful of browser vendors are doing.

Both are hopeless efforts, and each group must maintain its own standards.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
It's the old, old story.  Droid meets droid.  Droid becomes chameleon.
Droid loses chameleon, chameleon becomes blob, droid gets blob back
again.  It's a classic tale.  --Kryten, Red Dwarf

Received on Friday, 29 August 2014 03:04:52 UTC