Langtags Internet-Draft v-01 now online...

[Addison Phillips [wM]]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the note.
>
> Many of us rely on the ASCII to be able to make comparisons. Please,
> please: don't publish cruddy text files and assume that people will
> make do with the PDF.

My text files are prepared fairly carefully, but this is the first time I
have been the author/editor of an Internet-Draft. There are tools (not
pointed to anywhere) for helping with this sort of thing, but I wasn't aware
of them when I started on this (despite looking), so I don't have such
niceties as hanging indents. The text file isn't THAT bad, especially for
something authored in another format.

Now I have xsl2rfc handy and will use that on future drafts. I'm used to
working with xML and you should get results more consistent with other I-Ds.
>
> >Mark and I are drafting a list of changes from RFC3066 for the
> next draft.
> >I'll also include an index in that version.
>
> I, for one, cannot follow what is going on in this document without
> such a list. I'm not just being lazy here: there appear to be
> significant protocol changes that I can't pick apart in the text.

There are extensive protocol changes and additions.
>
> On an unrelated note, the thread about ISO 639-[3-6] makes me very
> cautious about this proposal. I agree with the desire not to allow
> IANA to be an end-run around the ISO process. However, it now sounds
> like the ISO process has become much more chaotic and nearly
> impossible to follow.

Part of this proposal's purpose (but not all of its purpose) is to address
stability concerns about ISO639 and ISO3166. I am a firm believer that these
standards and their RAs should be allow to do their work, that RFC3066
should not compete with that work, and that IANA not be used as a stalking
horse for registration.

At the same time, there are known *potential* issues with stability,
"ownership" and other policy issues with the ISO standards and this draft
also proposes mechanisms for dealing with those when and if they arise in
the future.

This draft doesn't deal with proposed or potential future ISO639-x
standards, and, speaking purely on a personal level, I wouldn't want to
incorporate any of them, at least until I'd had a chance to see them. In
fact, one could argue that RFC3066 only exists because ISO639 doesn't
describe languages that well on its own, so those ISO efforts might lead to
new approachs in the future for language tags. We'll see. In the meantime,
this draft does deal with nagging issues in RFC3066.

Best Regards,

Addison