Timetable for action: May 31 is suggested

Sean M. Burke sburke at cpan.org
Tue May 27 20:07:17 CEST 2003


At 01:29 AM 2003-05-28 +0100, Michael Everson wrote:
>>would be to have something else like two separate entities, each
>>specified in a separate RFC, one of which is RFC 3066.
>>        lang=lan
>>         script=Scrip
>Yes, I had suggested that a long time ago. Apparently this will fail 
>because current imlementations want to conflate script within language tags.

The only expression I saw of this "lang=X, script=Y" notion was one where 
one said "Accept-Language: uk, ru, sr, fr, it, zh" and then "Accept-Script: 
cyrl, latn, hans" and somehow it gets figured out by elfin magic whether 
the user wants his Serbian in Cyrllic, Latin, or Han Simplified.

The obdurately messy fact is that script preferences are /so/ tightly 
coupled to language preferences that it's ridiculous to /not/ "conflate" 
them.  This is a matter not of "current implementations", but of how 
hyoo-mons think.  Filthy filthy hyoomons!  When will they learn the joys of 
orthogonality and the austere gloire of a life lived by the carpenter's 
T-square and the Etch-A-Sketch!?

Yes, there is the /question/ of how to combine script subtags and country 
subtags: zh-sg-hant or zh-hant-sg.  But this is a question suggested by 
reasonable curiosity and a whim for "completeness".  It is not a question 
required by urgency or need.  The languages that /actually/ have scripts 
and are /actually/ used in multiple countries would only produce one or two 
dozen permutations total.  One might as well just arbitrarily list them, 
rather than pining for the coming of a glorious metaprinciple that would 
make all our mundane decisions for us.  This is not a Pandora's box.  The 
language tags are not here to harm you.  They do not bite.

--
Sean M. Burke    http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/



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