RFC 3066bis: Philosophical objection (harsh)
Harald Tveit Alvestrand
harald at alvestrand.no
Tue Dec 9 07:20:52 CET 2003
Summary:
I do NOT agree with using a liberal generative syntax for generating
language tags. I believe we should stick with whole-tag registration, and
stick to simple rules and guidelines for them, aimed at having, as far as
possible, only useful tags.
Details:
I think the use of language tags where the sender is free to choose from
multiple rules and generate subtags at will is harmful to interoperability
and harmful to the end-user.
I believe that the job of the language tags is to register all variants for
which there is a known need for making the distinction between the various
forms in the form of a language tag, and where there is a real reason why
more powerful means of expressing the user's preferences or the properties
of data are not appropriate.
Therefore, a system with fewer language tags is better than one with more
language tags.
I think, in particular, that:
- productive use of script codes hurts the current use of language tags,
creates potential for harmful confusion for the users, and is therefore a
Bad Idea.
Requiring recipients to match en-Latn-US to en-US is wrong.
- the productive use of years is a dangerous source of confusion, and that
year markings without an IANA registration to point out what they are
supposed to mean is making things easy for a sender at the expense of the
recipient - something that is not a reasonable tradeoff.
Requiring recipients to know whether de-1900 and de-1905 can be considered
equal or not, with no further publicly available information, is wrong.
- the use of unregistered, undefined name-value pairs in the extension
subtag is a dangerously complex and noninteroperable solution to a still
unidentified problem, and further harms interoperability with systems that
depend on the non-occurence of the = character inside language tags.
Requiring users who have written code to parse "lang=en" to also parse
"lang=en-Latn-US-x-undefined=even%20more%20undefined" is wrong.
Having thus harshly denounced 90% of the ideas in this document, I'll end
this note with a saving grace:
I think the idea of the -x- subtag for separating a registered tag from
unregistered variants makes sense under the current rules for Accept-Range,
and should be adopted.
Harald
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