Talk:Legacy encoding

This article was nominated for deletion on 12 September 2007. The result of the discussion was Keep.

Useless article[edit]

"Legacy encoding" is not "Unicode terminology." There is no such phrased defined or recognized by The Unicode Standard or Unicode Technical Reports. It is merely the adjective 'legacy' being used to qualify the word 'encoding.' You could have just linked it like this rather than creating a redundant article:

blah blah blah [[Wiktionary:legacy]] encoding blah blah blah

The definition in Wiktionary could stand to be expanded to reflect current usage, though. — mjb 07:33, 17 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

by unicode terminolgy i meant the terminology they use and seem to have introduced even if they don't formally define it. There is currently very little computer related at Wiktionary:legacy and certainly nothing mentioning character encodings. Unicode use the term in a way that seems to be based on the belief that if its not unicode its obsolete/legacy even though those encodings are still in active use and some of them have even been added or changed since unicode was introduced so they don't really fit the dictionary definition of legacy imo. If you belive that this information can be incorporated in the wikitionary article without hugely bloating it/taking it offtopic then go ahead and merge this into it. Plugwash 10:43, 17 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I don't feel strongly enough about it to nominate this article for deletion, and I'm not going to try to throw the "Wikipedia is not a dictionary" rulebook at you; it's just that, well, giving 'legacy something-or-other' its own article sort of artificially inflates the topic's depth. I mean, once it has its own article, you can then talk about it at length, as was done in legacy system, legacy code, legacy support, and legacy preferences (found those listed on the legacy disambig page), but the 'legacy' aspect of these topics is all essentially the same general concept, and the need for the topics to be explored in their own articles pretty much goes away if the word 'legacy' is explained well enough. As we have both said, the Wiktionary definition of legacy needs to be expanded to capture the nuances of these various scenarios. I'd rather have seen your efforts devoted there rather than here. Wiktionary needs a lot of help, IMHO. — mjb 18:25, 17 July 2005 (UTC)[reply]

As a technical term, it is undefined. As a biased speech (usually advertizing Unicode) it is not notable. I agree, it is a useless article almost without links, and references that do exist are confusing and misleading like “converting to and from a large number of legacy encodings” (from mined (text editor)). Encodings are classified by code point size: 7 bit, 8 bit, 16 bit, Unicode (may require different programming environments and API) and by compatibility: ASCII compatible, partially ASCII compatible and ASCII incompatible (these are different in processing e.g. in text editors and E-mail). Is there a separate problem with supporting of so named legacy encodings like e.g. supporting of legacy scripts (with unavailable fonts etc.)? There is not. We even does not need Wiktionary here, links such as “legacy encoding” would be appropriate in some cases, and this article should be transferred to a small paragraph in the character encoding article, redirected and forgotten. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 08:12, 13 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Digraphs[edit]

Why has no legacy encoding a single byte for a digraph? --84.61.63.97 17:04, 25 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Land of the Dinosaurs speaks[edit]

Shouldn't the list include ASCII? It' still the fastest way to get something small done quickly. Including a note that it is subsumed into Unicode/UTF-8?

Also BCD encoding is presumably still in a whole bunch of archives around the world. Franamax 09:31, 5 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The article doesn't need a laundry list. The source cited says that any character encoding that preceded Unicode is a legacy encoding. Jonathan de Boyne Pollard 17:37, 15 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]