Counting Heads
Harald Tveit Alvestrand
harald at alvestrand.no
Thu May 29 19:33:19 CEST 2003
--On torsdag, mai 29, 2003 13:32:42 +0100 Misha Wolf
<Misha.Wolf at reuters.com> wrote:
> Sean Burke wrote:
>
>> Aren't language tags treated as atomic by most applications anyway?
>> (Thus obviating the whole separability/inseparability shtik)
>
> Didn't you see my mail with a reference to the HTML spec?
> If that doesn't convince you, how about that little-known
> protocol, HTTP?
why go so far from the core RFCs for this list? :-)
RFC 3066:
2.5 Language-range
Since the publication of RFC 1766, it has become apparent that there
is a need to define a term for a set of languages whose tags all
begin with the same sequence of subtags.
The following definition of language-range is derived from HTTP/1.1
[RFC 2616].
language-range = language-tag / "*"
That is, a language-range has the same syntax as a language-tag, or
is the single character "*".
A language-range matches a language-tag if it exactly equals the tag,
or if it exactly equals a prefix of the tag such that the first
character following the prefix is "-".
The special range "*" matches any tag. A protocol which uses
language ranges may specify additional rules about the semantics of
"*"; for instance, HTTP/1.1 specifies that the range "*" matches only
languages not matched by any other range within an "Accept-Language:"
header.
NOTE: This use of a prefix matching rule does not imply that language
tags are assigned to languages in such a way that it is always true
that if a user understands a language with a certain tag, then this
user will also understand all languages with tags for which this tag
is a prefix. The prefix rule simply allows the use of prefix tags if
this is the case.
I don't think we have changed our opinions very much :-)
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