Request: Add retired tag "eml" to the IANA registry

[John Cowan]

Randy Presuhn scripsit:

> The case you're pursuing is one of trying to figure out where a user who
> has failed to use the registry might have mistakenly come up with an
> erroneous subtag.  There may be applications where this might be
> a worthwhile undertaking, but that's far outside the realm of standardization,
> in my opinion.  

The question is, though, whether we were right to exclude the
retired codes (now that it's clearly established that they
are not to be reused later) at all.  As I quoted earlier from
http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/changes.asp ,

        Retired code elements remain part of the code set and retain
        their identifier and denotation.

Since we do not AFAICT have limiting language in RFC 5646 that says we
can only register 639-3 codes in active status, it seems to me that we
SHOULD and perhaps MUST register the retired codes, since they have the
same denotations they had before their retirement.  I hesitate only
in the case of the Group 1 (nonexistent language) codes, since their
denotations are empty: still, there are only eight of them, and adding
a comment would probably do the trick.

> The handling of similar cases has always been motivated by the desire
> to provide compatibility with earlier versions of the BCP, 

True, but not a counter to my argument above.

-- 
Henry S. Thompson said, / "Syntactic, structural,               John Cowan
Value constraints we / Express on the fly."                 cowan at ccil.org
Simon St. Laurent: "Your / Incomprehensible     http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Abracadabralike / schemas must die!"