Sample IANA language subtag registry

Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com
Mon Jul 12 16:37:46 CEST 2004


> From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-
> bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Mark Davis


> The reviewer's workload would not change much, I believe, once we had
the
> initial list set up

And after ISO 639-3 is published and we want to incorporate that?


I will repeat that I am very concerned with this process. You guys
published an initial draft, which I guess could have been seen as the
plan of action -- i.e., "in this revision of RFC 3066, the issues that
we aim to deal with are reflected in this draft". But the scope of
changes is shifting when the thing should be stabilizing, and the design
change was made without any advance warning or discussion. And
discussion *is* needed.

For instance, as I pointed out earlier, draft 4 leaves things very
unclear as to which sources can be referenced: the code table provided
as a TXT, or the source standards themselves. 

Also, the change is being made to address instability issues, but these
are almost entirely limited to ISO 3166. If we are going to change the
reference to ISO 639 from direct to indirect, then there are other
issues that should have been considered. For instance, there's the
concern of an ISO 639-1 ID being added where one previously existed in
ISO 639-2 -- that could easily be resolved for good, but is not. Also,
we could be asking whether some of the IDs in ISO 639-2 are best not
used in this context, e.g. the IDs collections of languages (it is *not*
useful to declare of content that it is in "South American Indian
(Other)").

Then there's the question I raised above: is the language tag reviewer
prepared to scale up processes when the day comes that we add reference
to ISO 639-3? The change in the draft appears to have been made without
any consultation with the language tag reviewer. That should not have
happened.



Peter Constable



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