[Fwd]: Response to Mark's message]

[Martin Duerst]

At 09:38 03/04/09 -0700, Addison Phillips [wM] wrote:

>Exactly so. I wary of confusion between "language" and "locale". For 
>example, I'm reviewing the latest version of the OMI (Open Management 
>Interface) Web Services spec. OMI uses xml:lang to tag string messages 
>with a language, which is fine. But it also uses xml:lang to identify the 
>locale desired for processing purposes.

Can you give an example (actual syntax) of how this is done?



>In Prague, Mark and I sat down from some discussion of this issue. The 
>problem for both of us is that neither of us really believe that we need 
>anything more than a language tag to identify a locale. There are 
>"international context" items that are orthogonal to locale (timezone 
>comes to mind) or which are related to locale (collation), but a few fixes 
>to language tags (to deal with the same ambiguities that language tagging 
>folks already are aware of and discussion) would more or less fix the 
>problems we face with locale tags.

I think the right way to go may be as Peter sketched it in a different mail:

 > I, for one, do not think that RFC3066 should be changed to deal with
 > locales. It *should* be changed to accommodate distinctions in things like
 > writing system/orthographies/spelling conventions as well as language, but
 > not locales. Such an extended RFC3066 would be of use for locale
 > identification since language and text-related distinctions are relevant
 > for locales, but locales go beyond the scope of what RFC3066 has been and
 > should be intended to deal with.

In effect, 'orthography' could go as far as including things such as
number formatting or date formatting, and maybe even sorting.

The things left out would then be very much orthogonal, such as
timezones and currency, or 'exotic', such as paper size and shoe
size.


>Yesterday when discussing this in W3C-I18N-WG (WSTF), Martin suggested 
>that one solution might just be to create a new RFC for locale identifiers 
>that references 3066 or 3066bis, but creates a separate "referential domain".

The other problem is that if there are identifiers needed in the locale
domain, they would have to be registered as languages.


>That might be okay, but leads inexorably back to the problem Mark and I 
>sketched here the other day:
>
>Accept-Language: ja-JP
>Accept-Locale: de-DE
>
>Now what do I do?

The first thing to do would be to define what 'Accept-Locale'
meant. Once that had a suitable definition, things might be
clearer.

If we think that something like the above doesn't make sense,
then that means that we probably don't need Accept-Locale.

Regards,   Martin.s