New Last Call: 'Tags for Identifying Languages' to BCP

Sat Dec 18 03:09:29 CET 2004

>  Date: 2004-12-15 14:09
>  From: "Peter Constable" <petercon at microsoft.com>
>  To: ietf-languages at alvestrand.no, ietf at ietf.org
>  
> > From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-
> > bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Bruce Lilly
> 
> 
> > Currently sr-CS has a specific
> > meaning under RFC 3066; it has had for some time.
> 
> The meaning "Serbia and Montenegro" was introduced relatively recently
> (a little more than a year ago), was immediately received with alarm by
> many in the IT sector. There were vain attempts to get it reversed, and
> that failure was an impetus to introduce protection against such changes
> in the revision of RFC 3066. I am not aware of "CS" being used in the IT
> sector with the new meaning, though cannot guarantee that.

I can. I could, but won't, simply put some content up
with that meaning.  One example will serve to establish
the existing usage; I'll provide two (I'm a heavy tipper :-).
I could provide more, but that would be superfluous.

1. URI http://welcome.hp.com/country/cs/sr/welcome.html
   Aside from the obvious usage in the URI itself, the
   HTML content contains the following (my commentary
   marks items of particular relevance):

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html lang="sr-cs">

   N.B. the specific language-tag "sr-cs"!

	<meta name="target_country" content="cs">

            <td><select name="countrySelect" id="countrySelect" title="Izbor zemlje - Promenom izbora pre&#263;i &#263;ete na lokaciju izabrane zemlje">
                <option selected>Srbija i Crna Gora-Srpski

2. URI http://www.ibm.com/cs/
   Once again, note the use in the URI itself.
   Content includes:

<meta name="IBM.Country" content="CS"/>
<meta name="Description" content="IBM Serbia and Montenegro"/>
<meta name="Abstract" content="IBM Serbia and Montenegro"/>

<meta name="Keywords" content="IBM Serbia and Montenegro"/>
<meta name="DC.Publisher" content="IBM Corporation"/>

<title>IBM Srbija I Crna Gora</title>

<a href="/news/cs/2004/10/cs_sr_20041013.html"><

   N.B. "cs" and "sr" used together.

<!-- cs/sr/all assembled by mhpb v1.1 on Thu, 25 Nov 2004 12:22:14 CUT -->

   N.B. "CS" and "sr" together again.

Clearly neither example is referring to the no longer
extant "Czechoslovakia"...  And Hewlett-Packard (having
acquired DEC and Compaq) and IBM clearly constitute
representatives of "the IT sector".