[Ltru] Re: Archival of registration forms

Doug Ewell dewell at adelphia.net
Wed Apr 25 07:55:55 CEST 2007


John Cowan <cowan at ccil dot org> wrote:

>> It was thought that sending additional information to IANA that was 
>> not intended for insertion into the Registry, such as the requester's 
>> name and e-mail address and extensive bibliographic references, would 
>> result in confusion on the part of IANA and possible errors in the 
>> Registry.
>
> They seemed to manage it all right in the 1766/3066 era, keeping both 
> short explanations at http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tags 
> and full registration forms with name, email, and biblio at the 
> directory http://www.iana.org/assignments/lang-tags/ .

I was always singularly unimpressed with the level of maintenance of the 
1766/3066 files.  The summary file and the directory of reg forms didn't 
always keep pace with each other; even to this day you will not find the 
registration forms for "el-Latn" and "sgn-NI" and "sl-nedis" in the 
directory although they are listed in the summary file.

The names didn't always match either: for "i-default" the registration 
form has "Default Language" but on the summary file it is listed as 
"Default Language Context."  (How much of a battle would a minor 
discrepancy like that cause today, when a new registration is being 
delayed over a single word in a comment!)

Actually there were three reference sources at the time, if you count 
the page on Michael's Web site, which didn't match either of the IANA 
sources exactly.

It's partly because of the lackadaisical maintenance of the 3066 
registration forms that I was so strongly in favor of a single, 
all-inclusive registry back when it was first proposed in 2004.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages



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