RFC3066bis: looking ahead

jcowan at reutershealth.com jcowan at reutershealth.com
Tue Jan 20 19:12:41 CET 2004


Mark Davis scripsit:

> Currently, we can tell script from region by length. But if you toss in two tags
> for language, where the second can be of length 2 or 3, then you can't tell
> 
> lang-sublang
> from
> lang-region

This could be resolved by not allowing the 3-letter ISO 3166 country subtags,
and using 2-letter+digit subtags to resolve ambiguities in the 2-letter subtags.
In that way, a 3-letter subtag is always a language subtag, even if preceded by
another language subtag.  The number of existing language subtags is known
to be grossly less than the number of languages, but not so for the country
subtags, and countries are not proliferating like mad.

-- 
They do not preach                              John Cowan
  that their God will rouse them                jcowan at reutershealth.com
    A little before the nuts work loose.        http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
They do not teach                               http://www.reutershealth.com
  that His Pity allows them                         --Rudyard Kipling,
    to drop their job when they damn-well choose.   "The Sons of Martha"


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