Message-Id: <6.1.2.0.2.20050323143349.03ca8b50@mail.jefsey.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 18:22:21 +0100
To: "Peter Constable" <petercon@microsoft.com>, <ltru@ietf.org>
From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <jefsey@jefsey.com>
Subject: RE: [Ltru] Re: Preparations for smart matching
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At 09:18 23/03/2005, Peter Constable wrote:
>Script IDs are practical, and if some flexibility is allowed for in
>adding categories in the list of scripts, such as Hans and Hant, or Latf
>and Latg, then that can go a long way toward our needs. It may not be
>able to cover all cases of interest to users, though. (The recent
>discussion of Greek on the other list explores the limits to which
>script IDs can be stretched.)

Seems odd to read this. What is the target of this WG?
to conform to norms and to outdated practices, or to conform standards to 
users needs and to help transitionning the past?

Yesterday we had an interesting lunch discussion with among others a 
dictionary and a localization normalizers of different European cultures. 
We went into this proposition "15 years later you cannot republish a 
dictionary" vs. "a computer runs the 15 years old dictionary if its program 
release if 15 years old".

I proposed there are three classes of languages users to consider:
class 1. the lingua franca related mother's tongue people
class 2. the computers
class 3. the others.
and that their needs are orthogonal. This immediately seemed obvious to all 
of us and we discussed the similar situation of various Lingua Francae in 
Geography as well as History and even in business and human relations.

Class 1 is the majority of the members in here. Class 2 is only partly 
represented. Class 3 (while a substantial part of the mankind) is not very 
interested in IETF. There are various reasons explored in an RFC and in one 
or two complementary draft. But the real problem is the scalability of the 
technology. By essence the lingua franca's culture has vision, interests, 
priorities others do not understand (I speak with the experience of the 
former lingua francae - French and Latin). But it permits a simple, robust, 
ASCII Internet.

One of the priority of class 1 is to use their language to stabilize an 
environment where only one language can be used. Their richness is this 
cultural community and stabilization (with formal registered language tags 
for example), calling internationalization the external description of all 
what differs from their language. While others have diversity as their 
richness, with the added value of an occasional (degraded) use of the 
lingua franca, which help their quasi opposed way to conceive 
"internationalization" (what they have in common).

It would interesting to read the Bible back, about Babel. Forcing a single 
way to describe languages, in a way is to have a single language. Babel was 
not to create the mankind a problem: it was to free it. As long as class 1, 
2 and 3 needs are not equally considered and efficiently addressed, it is 
likely there will be no consensus to enter data into the core reference of 
the class 2 - what is the target of the discussed RFC proposal.

The target is not to make it work in ASCII RFC 3066 ter ABNFed langtags. 
The target is to make any system, in any format, in any language and 
culture and circumstance able to understand what is the language (version) 
of any given content. RFC 3066 only proposed a solution.
jfc





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