Script codes in RFC 3066

Martin Duerst duerst at w3.org
Wed Apr 9 15:02:10 CEST 2003


At 11:43 03/04/09 -0500, Peter_Constable at sil.org wrote:

>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.

I clearly wouldn't expect them either. Also, they are not special-cased
to not match, e.g., 'x' to 'x-foo'. But we hopefully won't have anybody
requesting 'x', and whoever does can only blame themselves for what
they get back.

So some piece of software (if thus specified) will always make use
of the hierarchy; it is up to creators of tags and users of tags to
make sure that this doesn't cause problems.

Regards,    Martin.


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