Message-Id: <6.2.1.2.2.20050511140208.0585a100@mail.jefsey.com>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 16:59:28 +0200
To: "Doug Ewell" <dewell@adelphia.net>,
	"LTRU Working Group" <ltru@ietf.org>
From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <jefsey@jefsey.com>
Subject: Re: [Ltru] Re: [psg.com #950] iso 3166 inadequate for regional
	variants
In-Reply-To: <008901c555ec$8707b800$030aa8c0@DEWELL>
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	<008901c555ec$8707b800$030aa8c0@DEWELL>
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This is why I work on a stabilisation of E.164. The problem of 
stabilisation is however not really important if there is a good support of 
the versions of a standard, what is obviously not what Mark and Addison 
have in mind from their recent responses.

E.164 has several advantages:
- it is network oriented
- area codes are highly granular and documented
- it is population oriented as more and more people get a phone or a 
mobile, even in difficult countries like Ertihrea

... and we work on a reference grid which will address this which makes me 
biaised.
jfc


At 07:44 11/05/2005, Doug Ewell wrote:
> > This comes from comment 22 in
> > http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg00540.html
> > which states:
> >
> > "22. 2.2.4: I understand that all the regional language differences of
> > the world are to be supported by the ISO 3166 alpha-3/digit-3 list.
> > This means that regions like NY, TX or California are not entitled a
> > code but the 56 persons of Pitcairn Island yes? I doubt that disparity
> > can hold very long, all the more than ISO 3166-2 provides all the
> > possibilities for a far more adequate granularity."
> >
> > As pointed out in message
> > http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg00628.html
> > the draft also supports UN M.49 digit-3 codes
> >
> > Based on recent discussion, can I close this with a "reject"?
>
>I agree to reject.  But I think this one needs some comment, since I was
>once a supporter of ISO 3166-2 in language tags, and have often cited
>regional differences in en-US as potentially worthy of tagging.
>
>Neither ISO 3166-2 nor any other geographic coding system -- UN/LOCODE,
>MARC 21, FIPS 10-4, HASC, any of them -- can partition the world
>perfectly and unequivocally in terms of language variation, partly
>because experts will never agree completely on what constitutes a
>"significant" language variation, and partly because such systems never
>guarantee equality as to the area or population of the encoded regions.
>
>ISO 3166-2 assigns a single code to California (population 33 million)
>and another to New York state (population 19 million), but it also
>assigns 21 codes to the Bahamas (population 303,000) -- one for each of
>the pre-1996 districts.  This is far from ideal in terms of providing
>consistent coding granularity.  Other geocoding systems have similar
>limitations.
>
>ISO 3166-2 also suffers from inadequate stability for the type of
>tagging mechanism described in the draft.  Code elements are added,
>removed, and changed (both description and code element) with little or
>no publicity.  Occasionally the entire subdivision structure on which
>ISO 3166-2 code elements are based is thrown out and replaced with a new
>one; this happened with Libya in 2003 and Slovenia in 2002.
>
>Variant subtags can always be proposed to distinguish regional
>differences in language that cannot be described adequately with ISO
>3166-1 and UN M.49 region subtags.
>
>--
>Doug Ewell
>Fullerton, California
>http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
>
>
>
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