Problems deciding if az- should have multiple registrations...

[Jon Hanna]

> Locale identifiers are hobbled by a long term confusion with language
> tags. Fixing locales requires either parallel changes to language tags
> or divergence.
>
> If you examine the case for divergence (which is a case I've made
> forcefully for the past year or so, so I've spent a lot of time thinking
> about it), you eventually end up with problems related to the fact that
> the language tag is necessarily part of the locale--and it conflicts
> with portions of the locale ID designed to solve this same problem. Long
> discussions with Mark and others have led me to the conclusion that the
> simpler and more satisfying conclusion is to treat language as the
> locale identifier and all the other things as preferences.... and fix
> the language tags themselves (to deal with an obvious glaring omission)
> rather than try to circle around the problem in the locale tags.

Could you please summarise the issues you have found with divergence.

I have yet to have anyone explain why sticking script tags into the middle
of language tags is preferable to putting them elsewhere.

I agree that language is part of the locale. I support the use of RFC3066 to
label that part of the locale. I believe that any standard for locale
identification should use RFC3066 for the identification of languages. But
I've yet to see a justification for rebuilding 3066 rather than building on
it.

There appears to be no resistence to the one
> case I actually care about today (zh-*),

Okay:
I oppose this registration. There.

I oppose it because I believe it will lead to the use of RFC3066 to contain
script information. I am unhappy with that for the reasons given. (I
wouldn't object to seeing it registered if there was consensus that it was a
stop-gap until a mechanism was agreed on that didn't intrude on language
tags.)

The long list of English codes
> suggests that this argument is actually empty:

There is NO long list of English codes. There is no en-FR. It doesn't exist
(and if anyone mentions "Franglais" I'll scream :). Yes I can put
xml:lang="en-FR" or whatever, but whatever I so label is junk.