deprecating www as language code

ISO639-3 iso639-3 at sil.org
Thu Apr 7 22:23:51 CEST 2011


Dear IETF Readers,

I have had the suggestion to deprecate www in the language coding. See the message below, and let me know what you think:

As more and more websites use the ISO 639 language codes, there are some problems with certain codes when they are used in URLs. For example, the code 'www', which is used for the Wawa language of Cameroon, is problematic because when it is used as subdomain, it obviously conflicts with the root domain.
For example, the English Wikipdia is en.wikipedia.org because its ISO 639-1 code is 'en'.
For the Wawa Wikipedia, this would be www.wikipedia.org which conflicts with the portal.

I propose to change 'www' to for example 'wwx' ('waw' and others are already taken).

Thank you for your input.

Melinda Lyons
ISO 639-3 RA
SIL International 
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Road
Dallas, TX 75236


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