Re: names of ISO 8859 encodings

[Helge Kreutzmann <debian@helgefjell.de>]

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Hello Branden,
hello Bruno,
hell Alejandro,
Am Fri, Dec 13, 2024 at 06:56:54PM -0600 schrieb G. Branden Robinson:
> At 2024-12-14T01:37:16+0100, Alejandro Colomar wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 14, 2024 at 01:23:09AM +0100, Bruno Haible wrote:
> > > Commit 3ed1de0ddccb42bae4151c7225d3fddeab04ff43 should better
> > > be reverted, IMO. The ISO organization or their *standards* can
> > > be renamed to whatever names; what matters here is what the
> > > *encoding* is commonly referred to.

There is no "renaming" intended. It is just the proper name of the
standard, which is often (probably because of sloppiness) forgotten.
There are two organizations who joined forces to create these
standards: ISO and IEC. Dropping half of them is not very nice and so
far, precision is what is good about the (man) documentation. You
should be able to rely on the documentation. So why should you stop
short when giving credit and citing documents correctly? And yes, the
correct name contains "ISO/IEC"[1].

Of course, how you name them in your day to day communication is up to
you (and should be so), but in the documentation it should be correct.

Disclaimer: I'm editor of ISO/IEC standards, but not in the field of
character encondings.

> > > The *encoding* names are standardized by IANA:
> > > https://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets/character-sets.xhtml
> > > The first ISO 8859 encoding there has the name
> > >   ISO-8859-1
> > > or
> > >   ISO_8859-1
> > > and the first among these is the preferred MIME name. So, please,
> > > in encoding names:
> > >   * revert the ISO -> ISO/IEC change,
> > >   * change the space after ISO to a dash/hyphen-minus.
> > > 
> > > Likewise (partially) for commit d5e5db91ece5955b21ae1aedc03ba1d56d3cf423.
> 
> Oy vey.  Helge Kreutzmann submitted a similar bug report to groff and I
> was planning to make the ISO -> ISO/IEC change to its man pages.

I'm not going into the business of valuating which standards should be
adhered to. But when referrring to the proper document the correct
name should be given IMHO.

> Also your point seems more strident than clear to me as regards the
> encoding name.  If I want to refer to character encoding _not_ in the
> context of a machine-parsed MIME datum, I trust you're not going to tell
> me I need to spell with an obnoxious hyphen-minus or underscore before
> the standard number ("8859")...?

My personal opinion is that correct typography is important, but on
quick reading I probably would not spot the differences amongs the
various dashes for example. So for me, having all the correct letters
is important and of course, to copy and paste text (e.g. code) where
necessary, even if that violates typography standards.

And yes, I'm well aware that Branden and Donald Knuth (and successors)
strive for well printed documents, and I'm glad for this.

Greetings

           Helge

[1] I carefully checked this. There are, of course, lots of standards
    purely from ISO (ISO 9001 comes to mind) and from IEC (e.g. IEC
    62443).

-- 
      Dr. Helge Kreutzmann                     debian@helgefjell.de
           Dipl.-Phys.                   http://www.helgefjell.de/debian.php
        64bit GNU powered                     gpg signed mail preferred
           Help keep free software "libre": http://www.ffii.de/

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