I disagree about handwaving: there is no place for caprice in the process. A registry is not meant to have a great deal of evaluation to it -- that is why it is a registry and not a standard. The registrar should reject requests that are ill-formed (registering a 9-letter language subtag), inapplicable or out of scope (Martian, or the variety of English spoken by Bush II), duplicates of what is already expressible ('english'), or badly named (though in the latter case, should suggest alternatives). We have to provide reasonable guidance to the registrar for making such decisions in BCP 47.
<br><br>Unless we state otherwise in the rules, a well-formed request for a real language or language variant, or true suppress script (overwhelmingly used) needs to be honored. <br><br>I agree that suppress-script is flawed. Maybe if we want a bright line, the "existed prior to 4646" is a reasonable cutoff, or we just stop as of 4646bis. Or we just continue to accept suppress-script requests, if it has not been a huge burden so far....
<br><br>Mark<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 10/8/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Addison Phillips</b> <<a href="mailto:addison@yahoo-inc.com">addison@yahoo-inc.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Doug Ewell wrote:<br>>> Now please, there's been quite enough meta-discussion. Let's nail<br>>> down the policy on <a href="mailto:ltru@ietf.org">ltru@ietf.org</a>, since it appears that what is<br>>> already written is insufficiently clear.
<br>><br>> Fair enough, but I expect not to hear any handwaving about leaving the<br>> details up to the discretion and judgment of ietf-languages and the<br>> Reviewer(s).<br>><br><br>Why not? Handwaving can sometimes be effective.
<br><br>Just because the current reviewer doesn't wish to document his reasoning<br>behind decisions and just because nobody on the list has the temerity to<br>try and document a "sense of the list" statement doesn't mean that we
<br>should *necessarily* have to do it in 4646bis.<br><br>If there are sound policies that we can document, fine. But we don't<br>even agree as a group on the sensibility of Suppress-Script, let alone<br>policies for its inclusion in records.
<br><br>Suppress-Script, as designed, is unmaintainable. It requires too much<br>information about too many languages to be applied consistently and<br>holistically. Unless we impose an outright ban on future registrations
<br>of it, there is no end to the list of registration requests that might<br>be forthcoming in the future.<br><br>Addison<br><br>--<br>Addison Phillips<br>Globalization Architect -- Yahoo! Inc.<br>Chair -- W3C Internationalization Core WG
<br><br>Internationalization is an architecture.<br>It is not a feature.<br>_______________________________________________<br>Ietf-languages mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Ietf-languages@alvestrand.no">Ietf-languages@alvestrand.no
</a><br><a href="http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages">http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages</a><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Mark