Proposal for a subtag registration (fr-2004-ORTOGRAF or fr-ortograf ?)

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 10:16:33PM -0800,
 Doug Ewell <dewell at roadrunner.com> wrote 
 a message of 27 lines which said:

> This is a silly rule that somebody came up with, and I don't believe
> it's our job to cater to the silliness of that rule.  What did these
> translation teams do before ISO 639-3 came along, a year ago?  What
> did they do before RFC 4646?

I do not want to excuse these people / teams (and I'm not sure their
policy was fairly reported here) but I want to emphasize that every
project with language-specific contents (software, Wikipedia,
whatever) receives a lot of requests from people claiming that "their"
language must be supported and, very often the team has difficulties
deciding wether the language is significant or not.

Hence the tendency to stick with stable, short and reassuring
standards. "If you're not in ISO 639-1, get lost" is an easier reply
than to engage a discussion with these people (who are often how to
say it, unreasonable?)