Message-Id: <6.2.3.4.2.20050827201217.0598d250@mail.jefsey.com>
Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2005 20:38:48 +0200
To: david.nospam.hopwood@blueyonder.co.uk, ietf@ietf.org
From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <jefsey@jefsey.com>
In-Reply-To: <431090C2.20804@blueyonder.co.uk>
References: <6.2.3.4.2.20050827113513.04327160@pop.online.fr>
	<431090C2.20804@blueyonder.co.uk>
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Cc: iesg@iesg.org
Subject: Re: Last Call: language root file system
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At 18:11 27/08/2005, David Hopwood wrote:
>JFC (Jefsey) Morfin wrote:
>>[...] The DNS root is updated around 60 times a year. It is likely that the
>>langroot is currently similarly updated with new langtags.
>
>No, that isn't likely at all.

Dear David,
your opposition is perfectly receivable. But it should be documented.

The order of magnitude is the same. I did not note the number of 
entries in the IANA file during the last months. This is something 
that I will certainly maintain if the registry stabilises. But in the 
last months there have been more than six and far less than six 
hundred. May be will you work out a list of the registrations to 
prove me wrong?

>>The langtag resolution will be needed for every HTML, XML, email 
>>page being read.
>
>Patent nonsense. In practice the list will be hardcoded into software that
>needs it, and will be updated when the software is updated.

Then? the langtag resolution is the translation of the langtag into a 
machine understandable information. It will happen every time a 
langtag is read, the same as domain name resolution is needed 
everytime an URL is called.

>This is perfectly sufficient. After all, font or character encoding 
>support for new scripts and
>languages (e.g. support for Unicode version updates) has to be handled in the
>same way.

I am afraid you confuse the process and the update of the necessary 
information. And you propose in part the solution I propose :-) .

The problem however is not to propose but to survive the users 
inadequate usage. If you have been around for some times in 
networking you know what I mean.

>  Languages, scripts, countries, etc. are not domains.

The DNS root tend to be much more stable. What count is not the 
number of changes, but their frequency.
- there is no difference between ccTLDs and country codes. We 
probably can say that there is one change a year. At least.
- scripts. ISO 15924 currently used supports 100 scripts, real life 
is more than 200 stabilised from what I gather.
- languages are 500 in ISO 639-2, 7500 in ISO 639-3 and 20.000 in ISO 639-6

The purpose of the IANA registry is to permit to adapt to reality 
(missing languages) and to transition towards ISO new tables. When 
you consider that the langtags are supposedly multimode and currently 
only support scripts, this means a steady need to adapt to 
multimedia. You should probably contact the BSI people to get more 
information on language analysis (I suggest you consider the 
preparatory work of ISO 639-4, the lack of definition of a language, 
a text, a script in a network context, lead to think, ISO will 
eventually come with much more flexibility).
Considering 50 to 200 updates a years seems very conservative - 
independently from the big structural changes of new ISO codes or the 
support of new tables - and completely live aside the 
variant/extension issue - whatever the way it will be addressed in 
the further planned Drafts.

Now, if there are updates, this means there are needs to use them, 
now - not in some years time. Same considerations as other processes. 
In a global system new releases are not localised. So either you have 
to update one billion softwares or one billion users.

BTW, your position tend to say that one do not need the root server 
system. What is an interesting idea.

jfc


PS. The problem is: one way or another one billion users, with 
various systems and appliances must get a reasonably maintained 
related information which today weight 15 K and is going to grow to 
600 K at some future date, with a change from every week to every day 
(IMHO much more as people start mastering and adapting a tool 
currently not much adapted to cross lingual exchanges). From a single 
source (in exclusive case) or from hundreds of specialised sources in 
an open approach. This should not be multiplied by all the languages 
that will progressively want to support langtags, but will multiply 
the need by two or three.For example an Ukrainian will want langtags 
in Ukrainian, in Latin and Cyrillic scripts and in most of the case 
in ASCII English, probably in Russian, etc. With the variants. etc.






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