Timetable for action: May 31 is suggested

John Cowan cowan at mercury.ccil.org
Wed May 28 00:50:27 CEST 2003


Michael Everson scripsit:

> I take umbrage at this.

Minister:  It seems the Americans have taken umbrage.
P.M.:  They have?  ... Where the deuce is that?

> Yes, I had suggested that a long time ago. Apparently this will fail 
> because current implementations want to conflate script within 
> language tags.

In the same way that they already conflate spelling.

> The interaction with country codes has not been addressed, has it? 
> EVEN IF THESE PARTICULAR PROPOSALS DON'T HAVE COUNTRY CODES IN THEM 
> THE PROBLEM STILL EXISTS. As tag reviewer, I think it best that we 
> decide what we want to do *before* certain tags are added.

I agree.  I have a proposal, founded on Peter Constable's model, which
is upward compatible, handles the most important things first, and
is straightforward.  To wit:

	LanguageProper-Script-SpellingSystem-Oddity

where LanguageProper may have internal structure so that the rule
"ISO 639 in the first part" is always respected, and SpellingSystem
is founded on ISO 3166-1 and possibly -2.  Sign languages always excepted.

> James Seng: What is best? zh-Hans-SG? zh-SG-Hans? zh-guoyu-Hant-SG? 

zh-hans-sg, zh-guoyu-hant-sg, but not zh-sg-hans.

> Etc. etc. etc. I want this question answered before I approve the 
> kinds of tags proposed. I think I am RIGHT to insist on this.

I agree.  But how do we get to rough consensus here?

> Mark's proposals have implications regarding other tag structures, 
> and that is why I am not accepting them at present. Is this in any 
> way unclear?

The trouble is that you are not rejecting them either.  On the view
you state here, you should reject them promptly.

> But this will not work with, apparently, the software that Mark is 
> using now; he needs to use language tags only to do what he needs to 
> do.

He is not alone.

-- 
Henry S. Thompson said, / "Syntactic, structural,               John Cowan
Value constraints we / Express on the fly."     jcowan at reutershealth.com
Simon St. Laurent: "Your / Incomprehensible     http://www.reutershealth.com
Abracadabralike / schemas must die!"            http://www.ccil.org/~cowan


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