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

[Peter Constable]

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


> Sorry, I should have gone on to conclude:  the important aspect of
> sub-tags is that their nature and purpose be identifiable and
> explained (e.g. that this is a country code), and that we retain
> compatibility with previous specifications.

Ah! Then the proposed draft ensures that the nature of subtags are
always identifiable, which RFC 3066 (as I mentioned earlier) fails to
do. 

And the draft retains compatibility with previous specifications using
an assumption (thoroughly discussed and concluded on the IETF-languages
list a year ago) that, in case of left-prefix matching processes, script
distinctions are generally far more important that country distinctions.


> I don't believe that simple
> truncation is a necessarily useful operation in all circumstances,

I don't think anyone would dispute that.


> and it probably should not be in the spec. at all.  For example, I'd
> say that we should retain the 3066 ordering of language-country and
> therefore script, if needed, comes later.  However, my typesetting
> subsystem doesn't care a jot about language or country, it just needs
> to find the script code ('can I render this script'?).

Here I disagree. For other purposes, I think it's very clear that the
only time that choice of order matters is with matching algorithms that
use simple truncation, and for the most common implementations, which
use left-prefix truncation, the order lang-script-country will be far
more useful in the long run precisely because script distinctions are
generally far more important in matching than country distinctions. I
don't know of any case in which a tag might be used that contained all
three subtags but in which the country distinction generally matters
more than the script distinction.


Peter Constable