Registry fixed (was: Re: Records Missing Required Field: jkp, nph, tvt)

Phillips, Addison addison at lab126.com
Tue Aug 28 23:52:09 CEST 2012


Doug asked:
> 
> > However, as far as I can tell, a violation of the field requirements
> > is not a violation of the ABNF. It is merely a violation of the prose
> > of the spec. So it would be acceptable to invalidate the individual
> > record on such a violation, but not the entire Registry.
> 
> Well, I don't agree. IMO, when we are talking about statements like "Each
> record MUST contain at least one of each of the following fields,"
> the prose of the spec carries as much weight as the ABNF. I'd appreciate the
> original authors weighing in on this.

In my opinion, the prose was intended to have the same or close to the same weight as the ABNF in terms of what constitutes a valid registry. While it is certainly possible to have created an ABNF representation of the registry that embodies all of the content requirements of the prose, such a representation would be cumbersome to create, maintain, and validate. For better or worse, the prose was used as the main vehicle of applying content requirements to the registry. The ABNF in Figure 3 is certainly very abbreviated (seven lines), whereas the full description of the file format, records, and their contents runs 13 pages... and there are VERY explicit MUST statements regarding the validity and content of records in section 3.5 spelling out that *all* requirements in RFC 5646 must be met before a submission to IANA can be considered completed.

> 
> > If we feel this is important enough (and perhaps we should, to avoid
> > setting a precedent), we could fix all this simply by changing the
> > Registry version to 2012-08-28 without making any other changes. Then,
> > both versions of the 2012-08-27 Registry would be out of date, and we
> > can retroactively consider the percent-sign update as version
> > 2012-08-27 and the Added update as 2012-08-28.
> >
> > Thoughts?

I think changing the File-Date record sounds like an appropriate way to communicate that the registry has been updated even though no new/changed records have been introduced.

Addison

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect (Lab126)
Editor (IETF LTRU WG -- BCP 47)
Chair (W3C I18N WG)

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.





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