Language Identifier List up for comments
A. Vine
andrea.vine at Sun.COM
Tue Dec 14 20:45:29 CET 2004
Elizabeth J. Pyatt wrote:
> For written language, this is not normally an issue because the
> phonetics are not represented. Therefore a single code of "zh" is
> adequate.
No, no, no, PLEASE don't use "zh" alone! "zh" alone is so meaningless
from both the computer and the human perspective when referring to an
actual text! I have kept silent up till now, with a wary eye for this.
The lone "zh" has caused us so many problems, I urge you to spread the
word, don't use it alone unless you are sooooooooo clueless about the
text that you are labeling, that all you know is it's some kind of
Chinese. And if that's the case, maybe you shouldn't be the one
labeling the text...
At a minimum it's really helpful to know whether it's Simplified or
Traditional, because it may affect the font chosen for rendering (take
for example a situation where the machine config has a Traditional-only
font as a default and the text is in Simplified.) But beyond rendering,
if software is trying to pick text from a language preference list, "zh"
really messes us up. It's much more generic than "en". From a matching
perspective, we tend to assume that "zh" really means "Simplified
Chinese rendering of Mandarin as used in the PRC", but that is not the
intention of the "zh" identifier.
Andrea
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