DR 09-0049

[MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given)]

Dear colleagues,

Japan proposed to replace shift_jis by Windows-31J.  In Seattle, there
was an opposition to this proposal from Microsoft.  However, Japanese
experts (including Ishizaka-san of Microsoft Japan) argued that
shift_jis has so many variations and that Windows-31J references to a
particular variation used by Microsoft.

In this mail, I would like to present two supporting evidences.  
I would propose to accept the Japanese proposal and close this DR.

An authoritative document is the IANA charset registry, available 
at http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets.  I was involved 
in the latest revision of the charsets shift_jis and windows-31j.  I
spoke with Microsoft Japan people and did this revision.

> Name: Windows-31J
> MIBenum: 2024
> Source: Windows Japanese.  A further extension of Shift_JIS
>         to include NEC special characters (Row 13), NEC
>         selection of IBM extensions (Rows 89 to 92), and IBM
>         extensions (Rows 115 to 119).  The CCS's are
>         JIS X0201:1997, JIS X0208:1997, and these extensions.
>         This charset can be used for the top-level media type "text",
>         but it is of limited or specialized use (see RFC2278).
>         PCL Symbol Set id: 19K
> Alias: csWindows31J
...
> Name: Shift_JIS  (preferred MIME name)
> MIBenum: 17
> Source: This charset is an extension of csHalfWidthKatakana by
>         adding graphic characters in JIS X 0208.  The CCS's are
>         JIS X0201:1997 and JIS X0208:1997.  The
>         complete definition is shown in Appendix 1 of JIS
>         X0208:1997.
>         This charset can be used for the top-level media type "text".
> Alias: MS_Kanji 
> Alias: csShiftJIS


Another important source of information is XML Japanese profile, 
available at: http://www.w3.org/TR/japanese-xml/#sjis.  I am the 
editor of this document.

> 5.3 Shift-JIS
> 
> This technical report and [XML] treat Shift-JIS, an ordinary 
> Japanese charset, as a CES that represents Japanese characters and
> [US-ASCII] characters in [ISO/IEC10646 (all parts)] or [Unicode 3.2].
> For full interoperability in the Internet, migration from Shift-JIS to
> UTF-8/UTF-16 is highly recommended.
... 
> There are four major conversion tables from Shift-JIS to [ISO/IEC10646 
> (all parts)] or [Unicode 3.2]. This technical report names them
> x-sjis-unicode-0_9, x-sjis-jisx0221-1995, windows-31J, and
> x-sjis-jdk1_1_7, respectively. These conversion tables are not identical
> to each other.



Cheers,
Makoto