LANGUAGE TAG REGISTRATION FORM

[Mark Davis]

This is extremely frustrating.

The distinctions among writing systems is absolutely crucial for
software. It may not make much difference to you personally whether
Chinese is written in simplified or traditional form, but I assure you
that it makes a huge difference to a great many people.

This distinction is inconceivably more important than the distinction
between "de", "de-1901", and "de-1996", which *are* simply differences
in written form and *were* registered. It is hard for me to think of
any rational reason for registering these minor written variants
(*much* less important than the difference between simplified and
traditional), and not registering the two variants of Chinese. (Cf.
http://www.iana.org/assignments/language-tags).

Can you confirm that this is your decision as registrar, to deny these
registrations? If it is, then we have little choice but to appeal
according to http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2028.txt and
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2026.txt.

Mark
________
mark.davis at jtcsv.com
IBM, MS 50-2/B11, 5600 Cottle Rd, SJ CA 95193
(408) 256-3148
fax: (408) 256-0799

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Everson" <everson at evertype.com>
To: <ietf-languages at iana.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 13:23
Subject: Re: LANGUAGE TAG REGISTRATION FORM


> I am beginning to think that it was a great mistake to encode
> yi-Latn. It appears indeed to have opened the gates to a great
> dumping ground of fixes for underspecifed software. Mark even
> specifically cites the "precedent set by yi-Latn". Thanks. Now the
> Language Tag Review can be *forced* to encode things, right?
>
> For yi-Latn I took Peter Constable's advice and Peter Edberg's
> concept of default script and decided that it might make sense to
> encode some of these different entities. Now we're looking at a
whole
> lot of duplicate language codes conflating this stuff.
>
> I think we should go back to first principles and figure out whether
> this RFC is supposed to do this or whether it is supposed to be a
> simple extension to ISO 639.
>
> Mark, Addision, you guys go talk to Peter Constable, Peter Edberg,
> Ken Whistler, Rick McGowan, John Cowan and whomever else you like.
> I'll meet Ken and Rick in Baltimore before the UTC and they can talk
> to me about consensus.
>
> Right now I feel that we have NO consensus, and I feel very uneasy
> about whether these conflations are "language tags" or not. Perhaps
I
> am wrong, but something feels wrong about this. I think we need to
go
> back to Peter Edberg's contribution and sort out all the bugs before
> we do this.
>
> I suppose this will make me unpopular.
> -- 
> Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com
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