(no subject)

[Martin Duerst]

At 12:54 02/12/06 +0000, Jon Hanna wrote:
>Conversely however, the separating the ability to negotiate on the grounds
>of language from the ability to negotiate on the grounds of
>language+orthography is likely to be more easily compatible with older
>systems. In particular recognising Old Irish in Ogham as a form of Old Irish
>would require guesswork on the part of a system built currently (guesswork
>based on treating language tags as hierarchical, which previous threads have
>shown to be ill-advised).

Please be careful. It is ill-advised to assume any particular
kind of commonality at any particular level (e.g. mutual understanding,
same script, or whatever) for two RFC 3066 codes with the same prefix.
However, it is not ill-advised to take advantage of a common prefix
or to match on a common prefix if there is some known and well-understood
communality. For example, HTTP requires that for language matching,
servers match documents in en-us and en-gb,... (as an example) for a
request that comes in with just 'en'.

Regards,    Martin.