No three-letter variants

Doug Ewell dewell at adelphia.net
Fri Feb 16 08:24:32 CET 2007


Everybody,

Please do not propose or offer support for three-letter variant subtags 
such as "nta".  They are syntactically invalid (not well-formed) and 
will not be considered for registration.

The syntactic restrictions on variant subtags are described in Section 
2.2.5, item 4.  There is a very sound reason for these restrictions: 
they make it possible for humans and computers to tell the type of each 
subtag without looking each one up in the Registry.  In the RFC 4646bis 
era there will be a tag "az-azj" for North Azerbaijani.  If a tag 
"az-nta" were also permitted, it would be impossible to know that "azj" 
was an extlang and "nta" a variant without consulting the Registry.

--
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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