"mis" update review request

[John Cowan]

Mark Davis scripsit:

> That means that in ISO 639-2 the following are collections:

> mul             Multiple languages

Yes, unfortunately.  639-3 takes a more sensible stand, and calls
'und', 'zxx', and 'mul' special (as distinct from individual language,
macrolanguage, collection, or private-use).

> The language codes clearly do not form a partition, since some
> collections encompass other codes.

True.  The collection codes, however, form a rootless hierarchy,
a rather flat one, of which "mis" is one top-level component.

> The collection codes that are tagged with (Other) are clearly meant
> to be the remainder of partitions, but for the collections that are
> not tagged with (Other) there is no evidence that they were intended
> to exclude other cases -- if anything, the contrary -- if they had
> meant to be the remainder of partitions, they would have said (Other).

I think that's reading too much into them; the entries are the work
of many hands.  FWIU, all the "(Other)" epithets are being removed,
anyhow.

> Moreover, while some may be perfectly willing to have stability go by
> the wayside, it is extremely important to us, and that is one of the
> guiding principles of and reasons for BCP 47. That means that if I
> validly and correctly tag content with "mis", that application cannot
> be made incorrect by any future change to BCP 47. That is why we can
> broaden the application of codes, but cannot narrow them.

+1

> There is no evidence in BCP 47 that I cannot correctly tag the content
> "kind" with "mis".

There is no *evidence* that you cannot tag "George slipped on a banana
peel and fell down" as "fr".  It's a quality of implementation issue.

-- 
Eric Raymond is the Margaret Mead               John Cowan
of the Open Source movement.                    cowan at ccil.org
        --Bruce Perens,                         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
          some years ago