draft-phillips-langtags-08, process, sp ecifications, "stability", and extensions

Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com
Thu Jan 6 20:34:25 CET 2005


> From: Dave Singer [mailto:singer at apple.com]

> >This is similar to the reason why the language code comes before the
country
> >code. If we had the order CH-fr, then we could end up mixing French
and
> >German in the same page, because we would fall back (for one of the
data
> >sources) from CH-fr to CH, which could be German.
> 
> It has to be application-specific which fallback happens.  If the
> user says he's swiss french, and the the content has alternative
> offers for swiss german or french french, which do you present?  If
> the content actually differs for legal or geographic reasons ('the
> legal representative in your country is', 'for copyright reasons this
> edition differs in material ways from other countries'), then the
> correct country but wrong language is the best answer.  If the desire
> is simply for maximum intelligibility, then the reverse is true.

But that is a level of decision making that goes well beyond any
algorithm that simply uses truncation of tags, which is the only case in
which the ordering of sub-tags matters.



Peter Constable


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