<font face="times new roman,serif">We use 'und' in CLDR when doing lookups, for example. The best patch for "und-Cyrl" in the absence of other information is "ru-Cyrl-RU".</font><div><font face="times new roman,serif"><br>
</font></div><div><font face="times new roman,serif">Java also uses 'und' in the BCP47 way, but also as a "replace bad input" (like FFFD for Unicode).</font></div><div><font face="times new roman,serif"><br>
</font></div><div><font face="times new roman,serif"><a href="http://download.java.net/jdk7/archive/b123/docs/api/java/util/Locale.html" target="_blank">http://download.java.net/jdk7/archive/b123/docs/api/java/util/Locale.html</a></font></div>
<div><font face="times new roman,serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="times new roman,serif">At Google, we used to try to distinguish between these different senses of "unknown" vs "any", but found that people too often just mixed them up, so we ended up just settling on a single subtag. It just has slightly different nuances when used as a query vs used as a result (or content tag). But that's the case anyway for locale/language matching.<br clear="all">
</font><font face="'times new roman', serif"><div style="background-color:transparent;margin-top:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-right:0px"><div><span><br><hr></span></div></div><div style="background-color:transparent;margin-top:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-right:0px">
<a href="https://plus.google.com/114199149796022210033" target="_blank">Mark</a></div><div style="background-color:transparent;margin-top:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-right:0px"><i><br></i></div><div style="background-color:transparent;margin-top:0px;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-right:0px">
<i>— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —</i></div></font><div><div><font face="'times new roman', serif"><i><span style="font-style:normal"><i></i></span><i></i></i></font></div></div><br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jun 13, 2012 at 7:27 AM, Peter Constable <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:petercon@microsoft.com" target="_blank">petercon@microsoft.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<div>
<div style="font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:11pt">Thanks, Doug, for the reminder of that text, which is interesting.<br>
<br>
Root, which is totally unqualified--I.e., 'neutral'-is different. In a matching mechanism that seeks the best match against a preference list, a neutral resource might be chosen in the absence of any other matching resource. This could be used to qualify a
resource as a positive match for any entry in the preference list if there isn't a stronger match for that entry.<br>
<br>
Mark, you mentioned using 'und' for some time. Has that been in private or public contexts? (We're looking at something that would be part of the Windows SDK.) And would you say the use was comparable to "root" (which I think is different)?<br>
<br>
Peter<br>
<br>
Sent from my Windows Phone<br>
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<span style="font-family:Tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;font-weight:bold">From:
</span><span style="font-family:Tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:10pt">Doug Ewell</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;font-weight:bold">Sent:
</span><span style="font-family:Tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:10pt">6/12/2012 5:15 PM</span><br>
<span style="font-family:Tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;font-weight:bold">To:
</span><span style="font-family:Tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:10pt"><a href="mailto:ietf-languages@iana.org" target="_blank">ietf-languages@iana.org</a></span><br>
<span style="font-family:Tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;font-weight:bold">Subject:
</span><span style="font-family:Tahoma,sans-serif;font-size:10pt">Re: lang ID for "*" (any language)</span><br>
<br>
</div><div><div>
<font><span style="font-size:10pt">
<div>I tend to agree with Mark that 'und' is the best choice for this.<br>
<br>
The passage in Section 4.1 seems to start off otherwise:<br>
<br>
"The 'und' (Undetermined) primary language subtag identifies linguistic <br>
content whose language is not determined. This subtag SHOULD NOT be <br>
used unless a language tag is required and language information is not <br>
available or cannot be determined. Omitting the language tag (where <br>
permitted) is preferred."<br>
<br>
but then goes on to give reasonable use cases:<br>
<br>
"The 'und' subtag might be useful for protocols that require a language <br>
tag to be provided or where a primary language subtag is required (such <br>
as in "und-Latn"). The 'und' subtag MAY also be useful when matching <br>
language tags in certain situations."<br>
<br>
On the list we've often talked about, for example, "und-Cyrl" to <br>
indicate text in the Cyrillic script. In a case like this, it might not <br>
be that the language cannot be determined, but that it doesn't matter.<br>
<br>
I think CLDR uses 'root' for a purpose similar to this.<br>
<br>
--<br>
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA<br>
<a href="http://www.ewellic.org" target="_blank">http://www.ewellic.org</a> | @DougEwell <br>
<br>
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