[Fwd]: Response to Mark's message]

Mark Davis mark.davis at jtcsv.com
Thu Apr 10 10:16:52 CEST 2003


> > > PLEASE!!! Stop complaining, start acting. Please submit the
> > > necessary registrations for the 10 or 20 combinations that you
> > > need, and follow through with these registrations.

1. I was not pointlessly whining*; people had said that it would be better
to get some sort of consensus before making any proposals, which I was
trying to do.

(As to the name "language_code_mess.html": that was purposefully chosen to
be slightly provocative, just to get the conversation going. I could change
it to something more politically-correct, but it is only a temporary
document anyway.)

2. I agree that the first step is to get the required 3066 codes registered
that have immediate need.

3. There are many circumstances in which text is written in different
scripts. Aside from the examples cited by Peter, transliteration is widely
used in bibliographic contexts. If it is not generative, then it would
require each and every new instance to be registered. While you or I might
not forsee that someone would need en-Thai, why force such a combination to
be registered before someone can use it?

(I am quite surprised that you are against a generative pattern. It would be
a bit like requiring each new XML DTD to be registered with the W3C, instead
of providing generative tools with a well defined structure that people can
use for the particular cases required.)

Mark

(مرقص بن داود)

* Maybe you'd say I was purposefully whining. ☺


________
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(408) 256-3148
fax: (408) 256-0799

----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin Duerst" <duerst at w3.org>
To: <Peter_Constable at sil.org>
Cc: <aphillips at webmethods.com>; "Ietf-languages"
<Ietf-languages at alvestrand.no>; <ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no>;
"Mark Davis" <mark.davis at jtcsv.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2003 16:35
Subject: Re: [Fwd]: Response to Mark's message]


> At 18:02 03/04/09 -0500, Peter_Constable at sil.org wrote:
>
> >Martin Duerst wrote on 04/09/2003 01:57:32 PM:
> >
> > > >However, the need for the addition of a script subtag to 3066bis is
> >clear
> > > >and present. And if 3066bis does not address that issue *very* soon,
> > >
> > > PLEASE!!! Stop complaining, start acting. Please submit the
> > > necessary registrations for the 10 or 20 combinations that you
> > > need, and follow through with these registrations.
> >
> >Or, alternately, is there anything that keeps one of us from beginning to
> >author RFC3066bis?
>
> I have explained why earlier, but I'm glad to repeat it (with a few
> tweaks):
>
> There are about 100 script codes. There are about
> 200 country/region codes, and about 500 (and increasing) language
> codes. Creating 10,000,000 codes for a currently documented need
> of 12 or 25 codes seems like an complete overkill.
>
> One particular concern I have is that once there is a productive
> pattern, the assumption that all the slots have to be filled in
> seems to spread in an uncontrolled way. I have seen numerous examples
> of tags such as 'ja-jp', which in particular as far as language goes,
> doesn't give more information than simply 'ja'. I have also seen
> software that insisted on always having a country/region code
> in a language tag. When I tested it, I would e.g. set the language
> to 'he', and then look at the HTML generated and see 'he-us', because
> the software was set with 'us' as the default, and I didn't change that.
> (needless to say that I didn't try out that software for more than
> five minutes).
>
> We haven't created a tag for 'Yiddish written in Hebrew', and Michael
> said that he would probably have rejected it. This is another good
datapoint.
>
> Another point is that while something like az-latn/az-Cryl is very
> good for language negotiation (e.g. HTTP Accept-Language/
> Content-Language headers), it is really enough to mark up the
> actual text (e.g. with xml:lang) with 'az' only, because the
> script is self-evident from the characters used.
>
>
> Regards,   Martin.
>



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