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

JFC (Jefsey) Morfin jefsey at jefsey.com
Tue Dec 21 13:53:47 CET 2004


At 06:57 21/12/2004, Doug Ewell wrote:
>Bruce cited the "procedural issues" that Jefsey Morfin and Vernon
>Schryver have written about.
>
>Jefsey Morfin suggested that the entire RFC 3066bis process be put on
>hold while a new "Multilingualism" working group is created and carries
>on its debates.  He implied that a standard for tagging languages must
>cover "6000 human languages" plus "non scripted and computer generated
>and past languages, what may lead to millions of references," and later
>said that "each sovereign, authoritative or historical language/cultural
>oriented source must be able to register its own sub-tag."  He stated
>that "IANA is not the proper place anymore to support such a Register,"
>even though the proposed RFC 3066bis register is really little more than
>an extension of the existing IANA registry that has existed since the
>mid-1990s.
>This is a filibuster, an attempt to stall RFC 3066bis out of existence.

I do resent you saying this.

I do not object at all to "RFC 3066bis". Any effort which may help 
multilingualism and evade from hierarchical concepts is good to me.

RFC 3066bis belongs to a 2nd generation network centric (catenet/internet) 
logic I have difficulties with because by nature it does not address all my 
3rd generation user centric demands. I only document and discuss them. But 
these problems are with the network vision, NOT with the improvement of the 
tools supporting one of these visions.

I would certainly revisit some aspects - the most important one being the 
ISO-639-2 priorty rather than ISO-639-3 only. But this is a logic idea in 
an hierachical/network centric network vision and it is an RFC 3066 choice 
which is broadly in use however confusing it may be in "-0z" character set. 
Another is about the documentation of the character sets. Last, I am not 
eager for any centralized repository, I think the W3C has documented the 
semantic web enough (even if I would need far more time just to assemble 
all its documents in one reference book) for us to conceive more modern, 
comprehensive and reliable solutions.

But these are NOT reasons to delay a bis to the RFC 3066. Only to review 
the general perspective of the RFC 3066 and the support of multilingualism 
which are not the intent of the proposed text.

jfc








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