Flavors of Hepburn (was Status of Japanese requests)

[Phillips, Addison]

> 
> > I am not. I support (and have said so on this list) the approval
> of
> > the Hepburn subtags. I am not sure if the other subtags were also
> > approved. I thought at least one of them had been withdrawn.
> 
> The two Hepburn subtags were approved.  The two other subtags were
> rejected (Michael used the term "dropped").  That is not to say
> that subtags for these varieties won't ever be considered, but they
> would have to be re-proposed.

Very good.

> 
> I agree that all this should have been stated explicitly at the
> time the decisions were made.

Yes. I hope that this will be the case in the future. No one, especially the requester, should be wondering if a subtag has been approved. It should not be the responsibility of list members to track the dates. I should think the reviewer would do this as a matter of course.

> 
> But here we have an interesting situation.  According to Section
> 3.5, the first of the Reviewer's options is:
> 
> "Explicitly accept the request and forward the form containing the
> record to be inserted or modified to <iana at iana.org> according to
> the procedure described in Section 3.3."

This was written in this way because historically the acceptance took the form of forwarding the request to IANA. I agree that this means that a true appeal could have the same issues I cite. But, also speaking historically, the cry of "whoa, wait-a-minute-now" has produced either swift elucidation by Michael or swift retraction while we all consider the objections. IANA is not a machine---it is a set of people. There is a little flex in the system and the LSR can use that in case of any true objection that needs consideration.

>  It may have been the intent of LTRU to provide
> a "last call" period, but that is not what Section 3.5 says.

I don't believe it was the intent. However, the announcement is important and the timing of it is mandated for a reason.

> 
> We -- the entire list -- need to prevent surprises and last-second
> pullbacks like the one you mentioned 

That would be my point exactly.

> (I don't know if that was
> "es-americas" or another example). 

I was thinking explicitly of that example.

> The way to do this is not only for
> the Reviewer to make the required public announcements, but also
> for
> list members to pay attention to the review periods and not save
> their comments until the last possible second.

I don't believe that the latter is really a problem. If you haven't responded within the two weeks provided (or, in this case, the extended period of over a month), it probably won't make a difference to the outcome. However, the reviewer(s) need to make timely, coordinated, announcements so that no one is guessing what happened or might have happened or might maybe someday happen. Those are the reasons for the very explicit language in RFC 5646 and for my spending the list's attention to this issue.

Regards,

Addison

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Lab126

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.