Prefixes for use with -signed

[Doug Ewell]

Here are some alternative ideas for the Prefix fields associated with 
the proposed variant subtag "variant".

(1) Instead of mirroring the 16 entries in Michael's list, we could 
reduce the list of prefixes to 11 by eliminating region subtags:

   Prefix: af
   Prefix: da
   Prefix: en
   Prefix: fi
   Prefix: fr
   Prefix: ja
   Prefix: nl
   Prefix: no
   Prefix: pt
   Prefix: sv
   Prefix: zh

This means a tagger could use "en-US-signed", "en-GB-signed", 
"en-AU-signed", or "en-BV-signed" with equal conformance.  It grants 
full Recommended status to previously unmentioned varieties like 
"en-AU-signed" without changing the registration.  It makes it incumbent 
on the tagger to avoid using "en-BV-signed", which does not represent a 
real SSL, or "en-signed", which is highly ambiguous, even though these 
are also Recommended prefixes.  This last is probably the greatest risk.

(2) Since "signed" is really intended for a multitude of languages, 
unlike "1901" or "rozaj", we could simply add a single, representative 
prefix, or none at all.  Section 3.5 allows this (second paragraph after 
Figure 5, last sentence).  The result would be that "signed" could be 
used with literally any language subtag or combination of subtags, which 
allows ludicrous tags like "egy-signed" but is no worse in this regard 
than "egy-BV".

--
Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California, USA
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/