LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM (R4): pinyin

[Peter Constable]

From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Yury Tarasievich

>>> And how do you describe an orthography, if not referring to the
>>> rulebook, institution or decree??
>>
>> You include references to books or other accessible sources that
>> document or exemplify the orthography...
>
> No, how do you actually describe it, like in "describe it in 8
> letters or less"?

Oh, you mean, What's the best way to construct a (sub)tag to reference it?

Fundamentally, subtags are metadata elements primarily designed for use in protocols and not for direct presentation UI. As such, anything that is unique and conforms to the syntactic rules for the protocol is adequate for that purpose. That can and do get presented to users on occasion, though I don't think we should go too far out of our way to accommodate that -- we can't expect to provide good, successful UI using 8 characters or less to convey non-trivial concepts. What is a worthwhile goal, though, is to provide enough mnemonic value to keep developers from getting tripped up. For that scenario, I think it's reasonable to assume people will mainly be working with subtags with which they have attained some level of familiarity. (E.g., one could easily make the wrong assumptions about a tag "eu-..." unless they took the time to familiarize themselves with it, and there's no mitigation we can provide to get around that.)


> Sorry for reiterating the obvious, but you ought to select
> something recognisable about it -- which *may* be the name
> of the institution *as well*, or the year, or both. It may
> be different with other orthographies/norms.

Sure, it *may* be either; that of itself doesn't logically imply that, in this case, only "1959acad" among all the options that have been suggested would be sufficient for the purposes I described above.


>>> The original request was completely over the board with the
>>> political groupspeak
>>
>> That may be the case.. But does it have bearing on the point
>> being made, which was that tags that have been discussed
>> other than 1959acad are not acceptable since they refer solely
>> to an institution?
>
> Wasn't my point, ever.

Hmmm.. Seems to me this is not the first time I've seen a comment made followed by a response from you that, after discussion, turns out (by your admission) not to have been about the things being discussed in the mail you responded to.



Peter