Message-Id: <6.1.2.0.2.20050321101658.031ffd70@mail.jefsey.com>
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 10:56:34 +0100
To: "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>,
	"'LTRU Working Group'" <ltru@ietf.org>
From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <jefsey@jefsey.com>
Subject: Re: [Ltru] multilingualism
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	<Pine.GSO.4.58.0503210704040.18607@korppi.cs.tut.fi>
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At 06:08 21/03/2005, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>On Mon, 21 Mar 2005, JFC (Jefsey) Morfin wrote:
> > Does someone knows about an site/effort towards a multilingual support of
> > ISO 3166 and of ISO 639?
>
>That's part of the work of the Common Locale Data Repository activity,
>see http://www.unicode.org/cldr/ which already contains a huge amount
>of data on names of languages, countries, and other things in different
>languages.

Dear Jukka,
thank you for your response. The cldr work is certainly a big starting 
point, but I have some problem with it:

- the copyrights of Unicode which - to my knowledge - make it dependent to 
the support of Unicode systems. They certainly reviewed that with IESG to 
obtain that an RFC requires a compatibility with a private project. But to 
date there is no mention of this agreement and of its consequences in the 
Draft (nor of locales in general). I even note that one of the Chairs 
opposed the idea that ccTLD local name be entered in the locale. This is 
why I rose the point: if the CLDR is not intended to be made available to 
all without constraints via the IANA, we should read the Charter as to 
document the cupport of systems like the CLDR and consider how the data be 
compiled otherwise.

- the XML presentation. I look for a formated compact database with easy 
daily update/downloads.

- security and scalabiliy. The obvious problem is cross-consistency 
checking by concerned people themselves and constant verification tools. 
Internet has a very stable, proven, database distributed system to support 
that kind of information: the DNS logic which can be/is used to many other 
things than the domain names, as an independent system or not. Getting the 
context of a site from an XML tag calls for a web site.

> > Today descriptions are in English and in French. This is not adequate to a
> > menu in Chinese or for a Russian user. I suppose most of the main languages
> > have an ISO 3166 translation, but I did not find a site.
>
>Software vendors have had to define localized names for use in menus
>and other contexts, but the names have often been incorrect and
>there have been unnecessary and confusing differences. They really
>don't want to do such things but implement definitions based on
>expert work and consensus in different countries. Hence CLDR.

Fully true. This is why I ask as I see nothing in the Draft.
thank you for your help.
jfc

======================================================
Standardizing Tags for the Identification of Languages should not be a way
to standardize languages and to unify the world under a dominant culture.
======================================================
For your convenience:
RFC 3066: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt?number=3066
Draft: 	http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ltru-registry-00.txt
Charter: http://ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
gmane: http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.ietf.ltru
If you were Bcced for information and not familliar with the IETF process:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2026.txt
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2418.txt
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3934.txt
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3669.txt
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3160.txt
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-hoffman-taobis-02.txt
======================================================
Jon Postel (RFC 1591): "The IANA is not in the business of deciding
what is and what is not a country. The selection of the ISO 3166 list
  as a basis for country code top-level domain names was made with
  the knowledge that ISO has a procedure for determining which
entities should be and should not be on that list."
======================================================
Brian Carpenter (RFC 1958/3.2): "If there are several ways of doing the
same thing, choose one. If a previous design, in the Internet context
or elsewhere, has successfully solved the same problem, choose the
same solution unless there is a good technical reason not to.
Duplication of the same protocol functionality should be avoided as far as
possible, without of course using this argument to reject improvements."
======================================================
It seems that what works for countries and ISO 3166 since 1978, should
apply to languages and to ISO 693.
======================================================


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