LANGUAGE TAG REGISTRATION FORM (Newspeak)

Martin Duerst duerst at w3.org
Mon Jun 2 14:43:15 CEST 2003


At 20:33 03/06/02 +0300, Thor Kottelin wrote:
> > Gumming up the registry with all possible idiolects is a Bad Thing.
>
>If a language variant can be defined, and especially if there is evidence of
>widespread and long-term use thereof, surely it should be registered upon
>request.

We have asked you to show evidence of 'bulk' use (actual contiguous
texts with lengths of more than a few words). 'Widespread' (in the
sense that it is in many different places, but just a word or a few
words at the time) use is not enough. 'long-term' isn't necessarily
relevant, we might well want to register a language that was started
just a few years ago (imagine e.g. an artificial language that would
take off quicker than the existing ones).


>Jargon has been shown to differ considerably between different parts of the
>city I live in. Some terms even have different definitions depending on
>whether they are used in a western or in an eastern suburb. I would
>therefore go as far as to say that tags such as e.g. fi-helsinki-west and
>fi-helsinki-east could be useful for a locally oriented site when performing
>content negotiation. Obviously there is a chicken-and-egg problem involved;
>if tags are registered sparingly, their use will remain limited, and the
>interest to register new tags will remain minor. In the absence of relevant
>registered tags, web site authors and operators will be reluctant to take
>the trouble of setting up content negotiation.

There is no 'chicken and egg' problem. The problem is at a different
level: Cost of content creation. Virtually no Web author will want to
create separate versions for the two sublanguages.

Regards,    Martin.




>Should the current registry, despite the practically unlimited namespace it
>has at its disposal, currently be nearing capacity, it should probably take
>steps to develop into a hierarchy, like centrally maintained hosts files
>were superseded by the DNS.
>
>Thor
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