draft-phillips-langtags-08, process, specifications, "stability", and extensions

Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com
Thu Jan 6 15:48:03 CET 2005


> From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-
> bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of ned.freed at mrochek.com


> My reading of that text is that it goes out of its way to try and
avoid
> direct
> discussion of a matching algorithm, talking instead about "rules" and
> "constructs". I no longer recall the circumstances behind this, but my
> guess
> would be that talking about algorithms directly moved this
specification a
> bit
> too close to implementation work, which in turn would argue for the
normal
> standards track and its ability to assess interop status, not BCP.
> 
> This present yet another problem for the current draft, BTW.

You say that it avoids direct discussion of an algorithm, but then imply
that it talks directly about algorithms. Which is it?

If it talks about principles that may be used in processing tags in a
general sense, but not a specific algorithm, then I don't see that there
is any problem. All that it is doing is giving guidance regarding the
semantic relationships that may exist between tags of different types,
and pointing out what processes may or should not change about a tag to
preserve it's well-formedness and preferred ('canonical') structure, all
things within the scope of a BCP that doesn't specify any specific
matching algorithms.


Peter Constable


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