Updated! LANGUAGE TAG REGISTRATION FORM : es-americas

[John Cowan]

Peter_Constable@sil.org scripsit:

> There is a problem, though, and we should be looking for some way to solve
> it.

Hear, hear.

> When subscribers ask for content, they somehow give some indication of their
> language preferences. In current implementations, this can be done in Web
> browsers in a way that results in the use of the HTTP accept-language
> header. (That's not to say that another mechanism couldn't be devised.) So,
> when Spanish-speaking subscribers in Colombia or Mexico or Argentina
> request a given article, John wants their system to return the same
> resource in each case.

This is actually a somewhat different use case; my concern is not with
negotiation (after all, if someone doesn't like es-americas content, I
have no alternative es-es content to offer them), but with long-term
metadata.  If I decided to arbitrarily tag this content es-mx, say, I
will be unable to distinguish it later from Spanish which is genuinely
Mexican in flavor.  I want a tag which will enable me to tell archival
customers in Colombia that they should capture content tagged es-co
(probably none), es-americas, or es, and it's up to them whether to
take es-* in general as well.

> I'm wondering whether, in a case such as Spanish
> (e.g. Reuters' Latin american Spanish content) whether that is, in fact,
> possible in practice.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect as a practical matter that they use
a general Spanish spelling checker and have a manual or automated exceptions
list.  

-- 
Business before pleasure, if not too bloomering long before.
        --Nicholas van Rijn
                John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
                        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan  http://www.reutershealth.com