draft-phillips-langtags-08, process, sp ecifications,
"stability", and extensions
John Cowan
jcowan at reutershealth.com
Fri Jan 7 14:12:29 CET 2005
Michael Everson scripsit:
> >3066bis provides a reliable way to locate country codes in all cases,
> >but the algorithm is different. And this is a non-backwards-compatible
> >change.
>
> Surely the only thing it HAS to be backward-compatible with is the
> existing registry.
Ned and others, it seems, have been using the following heuristic:
1) Country codes are found only in the second subtag of a
language-tag.
This heuristic, combined with the RFC 3066 rule:
2) If the second subtag of a language tag is 2 letters long,
it is a country code.
provides a mechanism for picking out the country code that will not
work in RFC 3066bis, where the rule is:
3) A 2-letter subtag that is not to the right of a singleton
subtag is a country code, and nothing else is.
The counterargument is that heuristic 1 only happens to hold in the
existing set of registered RFC 3066 language tags plus those that are
valid without registration; there is nothing in RFC 3066 that compels
it to be true, as tags like mn-Cyrl-RU can be registered by the process.
--
"Well, I'm back." --Sam John Cowan <jcowan at reutershealth.com>
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