Script codes in RFC 3066

[Mark Davis]

As Ken has pointed out in other fora, if a proposal's success depends on a
large proportion of authors properly tagging their pages, then there is not
much of a chance for success.

Mark
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Caoimhin O Donnaile" <caoimhin at smo.uhi.ac.uk>
To: <ietf-languages at iana.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2003 15:29
Subject: Re: Script codes in RFC 3066


> On Wed, 9 Apr 2003, Michael Everson wrote:
>
> > I don't see how current practice has much to do with your (very
> > interesting) database idea though.
>
> If "language hetrarchy aware" software is going to be the norm in
> the near future it could have the following implications:
>
>  - There should be more of a drive to label web pages correctly -
>    e.g. as "Pfälzisch" rather than as "German"; or as "Scots"
>    rather than as "English" if this is the case - because users will
>    (hopefully!) set their browsers and searches to accept the
>    appropriate wider category and still find them.
>
>  - More pages and other resources should be labelled with the
>    best available language information, e.g. "Frisian", rather
>    than being left unlabelled because the exact language is
>    unknown.
>
>  - Even more incentive to vastly expand the set of codes allowed
>    in information processing in the near future.  Less fear of
>    "getting it wrong" since the database will retain basic
>    information on obsoleted codes.
>
>  - More incentive to tag at the "sub-language" level, or at least
>    be liberal in the definition of "language".
>
>  - Little incentive to use hyphens in new language codes, since
>    the database would provide much better hierarchic information.
>    Existing codes with hyphens could be treated as atomic strings,
>    with the hyphens purely for human ease of reading.  Alternatively,
>    there would be the possibility of evolving towards an entirely
>    fixed-length system of language codes for neatness, if this
>    were felt to be desirable, with the previous hyphenated codes
>    retained in the database as obsoleted codes.
>
> Caoimhín
>
>
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