[Ltru] RE: [newsml-2] japanese scripts (was: person/name givenand family elements)

[Martin Duerst]

[cutting out most of the old thread history; please, everybody,
reduce your postings to what is really necessary to understand
each posting.]


I fully agree with Addison here. RFC3066bis has been approved by the IESG,
and the IANA has carried out all the necessary preparations. The only thing
that's still missing is the RFC number, but that's only a problem when you
want to cite the new spec, not when you want to use the tags.
The whole thing is very clear from the IANA page, it says:

Language Subtag Registry        RFC-ietf-ltru-registry-14.txt   Expert 
Review (Michael Everson)

which means that registrations to the Language Subtag Registry are open
and will be done according to registry-14.txt, with Michael as the
expert reviewer.

It may look strange that a 'law' goes into effect before it has been
formally published, but that's how the IETF works :-).

Regarding a script subtag for the Japanese Kanji/Kana mixture, my personal
oppinion would be to just leave the script subtag out. If a tag "Japn"
existed, the only real purpose for it would be to change

%%
Type: language
Subtag: ja
Description: Japanese
Added: 2005-10-16
%%

to

%%
Type: language
Subtag: ja
Description: Japanese
Added: 2005-10-16
Suppress-Script: Japn
%%

So there is really absolutely no point to add such a tag to actual data,
and only a limited benefit (formal completeness and consistency of the
registry) for introducing such a script tag (at least from the point of
view of RFC3066bis; there may be other needs for "Japn").

Given that, we could actually add "Japn" as a script all by our own,
just for that specific purpose (or at least we could propose to do so
in case another attempt to add it to the ISO script standard fails).

Regards,    Martin.

At 04:23 06/02/11, Misha Wolf wrote:
>Hi Addison,
>
>The problem is that we don't need a new subtag.  We need, rather, to be 
>able to use the script subtags which exist in the new registry (in 
>particular Hani, Kana and Hrkt).  As the new RFC isn't yet fully baked, 
>we're assuming that we must not do that.  And as the old registry has been 
>closed, I'm assuming that it's too late to request ja-Hani, ja-Kana and 
>ja-Hrkt under the old regime.
>
>Misha