LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM: pinyin

[Tracey, Niall]

From: Phillips, Addison

> It would be absurd not to permit the use of the 'zh' subtag with
> the subtag for the Romanization scheme, IMO. Yes, 'cmn' is more
> accurate. But we allow all sorts of inaccurate tagging.

Absurd? How so? 

"zh" on its own is logically no different from "zh_cmn", I'll grant you that. I'll also grant you that it leads to the majority of technical staff to make the mistake that they are logically identical.

It would be certainly a logical choice for systems designers to interpret the logically incomplete tag zh_Latn_hanyu to mean zh_cmn_Latn_hanyu.

However, while it would be nice if the specification itself could encode the handling of erroneous cases, as far as I can see it is not designed that way -- if you put something in the registry, it is considered correct.

So I feel it's best not to compromise at the spec level, and leave error-handling to the systems level.

Níall.


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