Proposal: Language code "de-DE-trad"

Torsten Bronger bronger@physik.rwth-aachen.de
Mon, 11 Feb 2002 22:00:51 +0100


Obviously there are two possible approaches:

1. "de{-DE}" stands for the old variant.  Advantage: All legacy
    documents are guaranteed to be processed as always.  Disadvantage:
    Users probably expect de-DE to stand for the current variant.

    That's the way LaTeX, my back-end system, works, because here the
    principle "every document must yield the same result -- forever" is
    religion.  One may like that, one may not.

2. "de{-DE}" denotes the current form.  Advantage/Disadvantage like
    above, of course vice versa.  This is the more common approach, I
    suspect.  I'd prefer that, too.  It makes the more frequent case
    more simple.

On the other hand, I think every thing should have a name.  I have no
problems with "de" having a time-dependent meaning.  However, I'd
prefer to have at least the possibility to use a time-independent tag.

So why not interpret the tag as I explained in my very first posting?
"de-??-????" for explicit specification, whereas "de{-DE}" may cause
the software (or whatever) to try to find out what it is, or -- if it
fails or doesn't want to do that -- it assumes the most current form
it knows.  Then people aware of the difference can use subtags, the
others have to hope for the best, and will get it mostly.  The best of
both worlds, in my opinion.


Bye,
Torsten.