See my message of April 12 2005 (was intended for April 1): "A Modest Proposal"<br><br><a href="http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg01060.html">http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ltru/current/msg01060.html</a><br>
<br><div style="margin-left: 40px;">Since it is obvious that all applications in the world will require<br>extremely fine-grained approach to languages, here is an initial proposal<br>for development of a separate RFC to deal with them. The goal is to be able<br>
to describe the variety of speech that each person on earth may be using at<br>a given time. Identification is by means of the location of the speaker and<br>the time at which the speech could have occurred. The language tag is given<br>
by the following format (formal ABNF to follow).<br><br>XLanguageTag ::= latitude "-" longitude "-" altitude "-" time<br><br>Latitude and longitude are specified by radians, and be measured from 0 to<br>
360 starting at the Prime Meridian going east, and from 0 to 180 starting at<br>the South Pole and going north. The numeric values below zero are avoided<br>because the use of the terms "positive" and "negative" when applied to<br>
location can clearly be prejudicial to many of the peoples of the world.<br>Should in the course of the development of this RFC, the use of the Prime<br>Meridian be viewed as representative of an English-speaking hegemony, a<br>
random longitude will be chosen as the origin. Use of latitude and longitude<br>does not, of course, imply in any way that those who believe in a flat earth<br>or the "four-elephant+turtle system" are in any way discouraged in the<br>
observance of their faith, nor does the use of radians in any way denigrate<br>the goal of the Kansas State Education Board to recognize the value of π as<br>exactly 3.0.<br><br>Altitude is in meters above the center of the earth. While some may feel the<br>
likelihood of two speakers being exactly overhead is low, we do -- of<br>course -- want to plan for all eventualities. By avoiding measurement<br>against sea level, we again celebrate the diversity of the world's<br>population, and do not discriminate against the proud inhabitants of Death<br>
Valley and similar locations by in any way referring to them as "negative".<br><br>For location, since people rarely overlap in physical space, it will usually<br>be sufficient to have accuracy to within 10 cm. But since fractions can be<br>
supplied, applications can have arbitrarily high degree of accuracy.<br><br>The time is specified by seconds since 0000-01-00T00:00:00Z (using the<br>proleptic Gregorian calendar as specified in XML Schema), plus an offset of<br>
1,000,000,000,000,000,000. If finer granularity than seconds is desired,<br>then fractions can be specified. The reason for the offset is to again avoid<br>negative numbers, and their implied bias against historic inhabitants. The<br>
offset is chosen as to be well before all current estimates of the Big Bang.<br>Note, however, that this in no way implies any denigration of creationism,<br>or that believers are in any way discouraged in the observance of their<br>
faith. Nor does it imply that any one system of creationism, such as Greek<br>or Norse creation theory, is any way inferior to any other, such as that<br>espoused by the Kansas State Education Board.<br><br>Other parts of this proposal, such as security implications, will be<br>
forthcoming.<br></div><pre><br>Mark<br></pre><br>