Preferred Values for Irregular Tags

[Michael Everson]

On 20 Jan 2010, at 18:47, Phillips, Addison wrote:

> The grandfathered 3066 tags already have to be handled exceptionally  
> in code. What Mark is trying to do is map all of them to  
> “normal” (what RFC 5646 calls “regular”) language tags. Otherwise a  
> tag such as “en-GB-oed” is treated as if it were a single atomic  
> subtag.
>
> This doesn’t pose a problem for existing users of the tag. They  
> don’t have to change to a new variant (although it would be nice of  
> them to migrate to it). Their existing content will work as well as  
> ever. However, software that sees the tag “en-GB-oed” can transform  
> it to (for example) “en-GB-oxford” and then do useful things (such  
> as noticing that it is related to “en-GB” when doing text-to-speech,  
> for example). And other users can apply more or fewer subtags to  
> suit their needs (“en-oxford”, “en-Brai-GB-oxford”, or absurdly “en- 
> GB-fonipa-oxford”).

Ah. I understand now. Thank you.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/