Script codes in RFC 3066

Peter_Constable at sil.org Peter_Constable at sil.org
Wed Apr 9 12:43:23 CEST 2003


Jon Hanna wrote on 04/09/2003 10:37:20 AM:

> Likewise the hierarchical nature of RFC 3066 is useful, but doesn't
prevent
> us from using them as opaque strings (beyond insisting on
> case-insensitivity) in applications that either don't care about that
> hierarchy, or which are applying their own hierarchical information.

I hear this said, but when I think about the mechanism utilised by
RFC3066's language-range and HTTP's accept-language, I suspect that
implementations will not be distinguishing situations in which inferring a
hierarchy is appropriate from situations in which the tags should only be
considered opaquely. For instance, it has been suggested that Martha's
Vineyard sign could be distinguished from ASL by an additional subtag,
sgn-US-mvinyrd (or whatever) versus sgn-US, but then notice that the
language-range / accept-language mechanism would mean that a request for
sgn-US could result in sgn-US-mvinyrd content being returned -- I wouldn't
expect HTTP servers to be written to special-case a tag like sgn-US-mvinyrd
to make it appear opague to the accept-language algorithm.



- Peter


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Peter Constable

Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
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