draft-phillips-langtags-08, process, sp ecifications,
"stability", and extensions
John Cowan
jcowan at reutershealth.com
Tue Jan 4 19:04:46 CET 2005
ned.freed at mrochek.com scripsit:
> I know of two other wrinkles in the RFC 1766 world:
Are you aware that RFC 1766 has been obsolete for four years now?
> (2) SGN- requires special handling, in that SGN-FR and SGN-EN are in fact
> sufficiently different languages that a primary tag match should not be
> taken to be a generic match.
The same is true of the various registered zh-* tags.
> (a) Extension tags appear as the first subtags, and as such have to
> be taken into account when looking for country subtags.
Finding country codes is straightforward: any non-initial subtag of two letters
(not appearing to the right of "x-" or "-x-") is a country code.
This is true in RFC 1766, RFC 3066, and the current draft.
> (b) Script tags change the complexion of the matching problem significantly,
> in that they can interact with external factors like charset information
> in odd ways.
Can you clarify this? Charset information neither specifies nor necessarily
restricts (except in text/plain) the script used to write a document.
> (c) UN country numbers have been added (IMO for no good reason), requiring
> handling similar to country codes.
They provide for supranational language varieties and for stability in
country codes which is inappropriate for ISO 3166 alphabetic codes (which
are codes for country *names*).
> The bottom line is that while I know how to write reasonable code to do RFC
> 1766 matching (and have in fact done so for widely deployed software), I
> haven't a clue how to handle this new draft competently in regards to
> matching.
The draft describes only the RFC 1766 (3066) algorithm, without excluding
other algorithms to be defined later.
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