Subject: Re: <draft-hoffman-char-lang-media-01.txt>

From: Graham Klyne <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 12:07:40 +0100

At 17:50 26/07/99 -0400, Al Gilman wrote:

>>>Summary of the media feature indicated by this feature tag:
>>>    Ability to display particular charsets as defined in [CHARSET]
>>
>>Also:
>>
>># When used to describe a document or data resource, indicates that
>># the character set is used by the resource.
>
>Do we want to say "document encoding" and not "character set" here?
>Suggest change to 
>
># the indicated document encoding is used in serving the resource.

Er, excuse me for being slow, but I'm not sure what is meant by "document
encoding" here.  This feature tag is specifically about "charset" handling.

(If you are referring to use of UTF-8, then I have read --I forget where--
that this is regarded as a character set for these purposes.  (In the
charset registration reference?)

Would "character encoding" capture your intent?

#g

------------
Graham Klyne
([email-masked])

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From: Al Gilman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 07:45:32 -0400

>Would "character encoding" capture your intent?

"Character encoding" it is; see response from Martin.

'Charset' is an unfortunate contraction because "character set" exists and
means something else.

Al

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From: Al Gilman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 10:07:36 -0400

Maybe what Martin and I are reflecting is an SGML-slanted preference for
terminology, but for backup on why one should not simply call CHARSET the
"character set" see for example:

 HTML Document Representation
 http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/charset.html#encodings

"character encoding" is fine.

Al

---

From: "Martin J. Duerst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 1999 10:31:15 +0900

> "character encoding" is fine.

This has nothing to do with SGML-slantedness, it's just plain old Math.

For more details, please see
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/charset-harmful.

Regards,   Martin.

#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, World Wide Web Consortium
#-#-#  mailto:[email-masked]   http://www.w3.org