Re: [hybi] US-ASCII vs. ASCII in Web Socket Protocol

[Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch>]

(-cc whatwg to reduce cross-posting)

On Sat, 30 Jan 2010, Julian Reschke wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> > On Fri, 4 Dec 2009, WeBMartians wrote:
> > > Hmmm... Maybe it would be better to say ISO-646US rather than ASCII. There
> > > is a lot of impreciseness about the very low value characters (less than
> > > 0x20 space) in the ASCII "specifications." The same can be said about the
> > > higher end.
> > 
> > Where the interpretation was normative, I've used the term "ANSI_X3.4-1968
> > (US-ASCII)" and referenced RFC1345.
> 
> I think you just lost both readability and precision.
> 
> Please keep saying "ASCII" or "US-ASCII", and then have a reference to the
> ANSI or ISO spec that actually defines ASCII, such as
> 
>    [ANSI.X3-4.1986]  American National Standards Institute, "Coded
>                      Character Set - 7-bit American Standard Code for
>                      Information Interchange", ANSI X3.4, 1986.
> 
> (taken from the relatively recent RFC 5322).
> 
> RFC 1345 is a non-maintained, historic informational RFC that's nit 
> really a good definition for ASCII. If you disagree, please name a 
> single RFC that has been published in the last 20 years that uses RFC 
> 1345 to reference ASCII (I just searched, and couldn't find any).

I used "ANSI_X3.4-1968" because that's the canonical name for US-ASCII, 
and I used RFC1345 because that's the canonical reference. If you disagree 
with these choices, please update the IANA registry.


On Sun, 31 Jan 2010, NARUSE, Yui wrote:
>
> The use of US-ASCII and ASCII in draft-hixie-thewebsocketprotocol-54 is 
> correct. Changing all to ASCII or ANSI_X3.4-1968 is not correct.

I only changed it in the cases where it referenced the actual encoding.


> In draft-hixie-thewebsocketprotocol-54, allthe term "US-ASCII" are used 
> as "encoded as US-ASCII". This use is as encoding name. So the prefered 
> MIME name, "US-ASCII" is correct.

The term "US-ASCII" caused confusion, unfortunately, which is why I 
changed to the less ambiguous ANSI_X3.4-1968. I agree that using the 
preferred MIME name is better than using the canonical name in general.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'