Timetable for action: May 31 is suggested

Michael Everson everson at evertype.com
Tue May 27 00:02:44 CEST 2003


At 21:18 +0000 2003-05-26, John Clews wrote:

>My request - which I would happily simplify to Peter's simplificatio
>to two possibilities - is to see this resolved.
>
>It's a request for action - not rhetoric.

The *action* we are undertaking is discussion.

>People have specific _technical_needs_ which RFC 3066 and the
>associated Language Tag Review process is intended to be able to
>provide.

It is not clear that the specific suggestions proposed are the best 
way to solve the technical needs. Indeed, there seem to be a great 
many opinions about this matter.

Applying for a language tag does not guarantee its registration 
within two weeks. If there is doubt, or room for discussion, then the 
time frame is extended. We have done this before.

I have also rejected tags. For instance, I rejected es-americas 
because it wasn't *a* language. Or no one was able to convince me 
about it.

>They're not contributing to this list just to add to the philosophy 
>of languages and other attributes that can get associated with 
>languages.

Right. Some of this began with Peter Edberg's discussion paper, which 
was a draft. It was intended to guide the implementation community in 
general, and it seems to me to be perfectly reasonable to try in the 
first place to get consensus on the principle of adding this kind of 
thing in the first place, and now, since sooooo many people like to 
parse these things, we have the issue of the syntax. And then there 
is the issue of defaults and no-defaults. One person thinks we should 
add yi-Hebr as well as yi-Latn.

For the record, I agree pretty much with Ken. This stuff is a cheap 
hack, and it's idiotic that we have to add stuff like this into 
<lang=> tags when it really ought to be in <script=> tags.

We are doing more than just deciding whether to satisfy Mark's 
immediate requirements. We are making decisions which can help Yours 
Truly actually do this stuff more gracefully in future.

We *DO* need to have a policy on these matters. We *DO* need to have 
a consensus decision on syntax. Is it to be zh-Hans-SG or zh-SG-Hans? 
Do you know? Do you care? Does it matter?

And to Addison: the palpable thing you're looking for is that these 
proposals are crap, they are hacks for a specific locale tagging 
system which itself ought to have been rethought and rewritten, and 
now it's dumped on this poor RFC.

And to John Clews: Your Reviewer has about a week in Dublin before he 
has to got to Baltimore for the greater glory of encoding Cuneiform, 
and then when he gets back he goes to Oxford for the greater glory of 
encoding medieval weirdo Latin letters, and he is sure that nothing 
is going to happen between now and the middle of June, which gives 
Mark and the rest of you PLENTY of time to talk to Peter Edberg and 
Ken and Harald and come up with a MATURE position and policy 
document, so that Your Reviewer doesn't have to be BLAMED when he 
balks at encoding things that he thinks are dodgy.
-- 
Michael Everson * * Everson Typography *  * http://www.evertype.com


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