draft-phillips-langtags-04 /3. provision for grandfathered tags

Tex Texin tex at xencraft.com
Thu Jul 1 12:18:43 CEST 2004


The bullet "This provision does not apply to grandfathered tags." confuses me.

Does it refer to the immediate prior bullet, the 2 prior bullets, all bullets
including those that follow, or the entire section?

It is however amusing to consider that it only applies to itself. ;-)

It also occurs to me that if the (whichever) provision did apply to
grandfathered tags, then the tags are not grandfathered. ;-)

(sorry- I have been staring at this document for too long.)
Please clarify which provision is referred to.

=============================
Also, a minor editorial comment on the 2 numbered bullets. It took me a few
minutes to determine that the examples were essentially the same principle
applied to the 2 different standards (3166 and 639) and the intent wasn't to
show 2 different points (which is what I expected with numbered bullets).
This would be more clear to the reader if roughly equivalent statements were
not said in completely different ways.

a) "833 remains the canonical subtag, and QX would be assigned 833 as an alias"
is equivalent to
"the new ISO 639 code would be entered into the IANA registry with a canonical
mapping to enochian".

It would be better (to my mind)if both were stated in similar ways.

Perhaps:
"833 remains the canonical subtag. QX would be registered in IANA and its entry
will show 833 as the canonical value."
and
"Enochian remains the canonical subtag. The new ISO 639 code would be
registered in IANA and its entry will show Enochian as the canonical value."

b) not quite equivalent statements but turning on the same point are:
"prevents tags that are in canonical form from becoming non-canonical" and "new
ISO code can be used but it is not canonical".

I suggest both of these statements be moved into the paragraph preceding the 2
bullets.
So the para would end something like: 
"...MUST have a canonical alias of the existing subtag. This prevents tags that
are in canonical form from becoming non-canonical. The new codes will be
entered into the IANA registry with a mapping to the preexisting canonical
form."
========================
fyi the word "withdrawl" in the 5th para is a typo.

tex



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