xx-XX-nnnn vs. xx-nnnn in Chinese and German
A. Vine
andrea.vine@Sun.COM
Wed, 13 Feb 2002 13:35:01 -0800
Torsten Bronger wrote:
>
>
> I need de-AT/DE for the mapping on LaTeX identifiers. LaTeX has to
> distinguish, because it generates some text. E.g. the date: "Januar" in
> Germany, "Jänner" in Austria. So if I write a letter in XML which is
> converted to LaTeX which then puts in the date -- the country of origin
> is essential.
Right. There are important contexts for using the country id.
>
> > Then comes the problem of what to do when the country is known, but there's
> > nothing specific to that country in the text. Is it better to tag it with
> > the country id, or to leave off the country id so that the text can be
> > better categorized as more generic?
>
> In this context: The RFC 3066 says that these tags should be interpreted
> as "one token". I understand this so that a software should
> understand the whoule tag or nothing. Is this a good approach? If
> "fallbacks" were allowed, I'd see no problem with "overtagging" texts.
One token is needed because sometimes systems will do a simple match. But what
that tag is used for can be quite diverse. It might be used to determine which
font to select, which spell-checker to use, which date format to append, or what
category to put the data in. In the last case, I was thinking about some sort
of information portal, which categorizes the texts to determine what might be
relevant to a user. So an Austrian would get a list of texts with the de and
de-date tags as well as all de-AT texts.
It's just a consideration, not anything I propose to limit.
>
> Mmmh... what's wrong with the "canonical" approach?
As long as it's specified as below, I think it would be clear enough to work
with.
>
> Language Subform Orthography
> de German ? ?
> de-DE German Germany ?
> de-AT German Austria ?
> de-DE-1996 German Germany "new"
> de-AT-1996 German Austria "new"
> de-DE-1901 German Germany "old"
> de-AT-1901 German Austria "old"
> de-1996 German ? "new"
> de-1901 German ? "new"
>
> "?" means: Dear software/reader, try to find it out, or use your
> default. That may sound a little bit arbitrary, but
> someone who can't say more about their language than
> just "de" can't expect more.
>
> Bye,
> Torsten.
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