The limit of language codes
Mark Crispin
MRC at CAC.Washington.EDU
Fri Feb 16 21:36:48 CET 2007
On Fri, 16 Feb 2007, CE Whitehead wrote:
> (I thought the
> motto was be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you request
> or something like that.)
That phrase has so persistantly and repeatedly been abused that it has
long ceased to have any value in any argument. In fact, it is now the
case that anyone who utters it loses the argument by default.
I knew Jon Postel. I know what he meant when he first stated the
robustness principle. It was a requirement that implementations of a
protocol implement all mandatory-to-implement facilities, even those that
seem to be useless; but to use only the ones which are in common use. In
the bad old days, it was common for implementations to pick and choose a
subset of to support; and all too often there were cases of no-overlap in
the subset.
None of this has any relevance to language tags; nor to policy matters
such as whether a new tag is needed for the scientific jargon of nuclear
physics as used in 14th century French whorehouses.
-- Mark --
http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
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