draft-phillips-langtags-08, process, sp ecifications,
"stability", and extensions
Dave Singer
singer at apple.com
Fri Jan 7 00:39:14 CET 2005
I'm sorry, this example I gave doesn't correspond to *language*
matching. My error. My apologies.
(Nor should my questions on this subject be seen as suggesting either
that I as an individual, or particularly Apple as a company, is
unhappy revising RFC 3066.)
At 12:35 PM -0800 1/6/05, Dave Singer wrote:
>At 12:14 PM -0800 1/6/05, Peter Constable wrote:
>> > From: Dave Singer [mailto:singer at apple.com]
>>
>>> Sorry, I should have gone on to conclude: the important aspect of
>>> sub-tags is that their nature and purpose be identifiable and
>>> explained (e.g. that this is a country code), and that we retain
>>> compatibility with previous specifications.
>>
>>Ah! Then the proposed draft ensures that the nature of subtags are
>>always identifiable, which RFC 3066 (as I mentioned earlier) fails to
>>do.
>>
>>And the draft retains compatibility with previous specifications using
>>an assumption (thoroughly discussed and concluded on the IETF-languages
>>list a year ago) that, in case of left-prefix matching processes, script
>>distinctions are generally far more important that country distinctions.
>
>as has been beautifully pointed out on the list, that is a view that
>is lingo-centric. If what I am trying to differentiate is the price
>(and the currency of the price) of an item, the country may be much
>more important than the script that the price is written in. (this
>is also an example for the last point below). I repeat, I don't
>think truncation -- and hence prefix-matching -- is very stable or
>nearly universally applicable enough to be mentioned. Whereas I do
>believe compatibility of ordering with 3066 is important.
>
>>
>>> I don't believe that simple
>>> truncation is a necessarily useful operation in all circumstances,
>>
>>I don't think anyone would dispute that.
>>
>>> and it probably should not be in the spec. at all. For example, I'd
>>> say that we should retain the 3066 ordering of language-country and
>>> therefore script, if needed, comes later. However, my typesetting
>>> subsystem doesn't care a jot about language or country, it just needs
>>> to find the script code ('can I render this script'?).
>>
>>Here I disagree. For other purposes, I think it's very clear that the
>>only time that choice of order matters is with matching algorithms that
>>use simple truncation, and for the most common implementations, which
>>use left-prefix truncation, the order lang-script-country will be far
>>more useful in the long run precisely because script distinctions are
>>generally far more important in matching than country distinctions. I
>>don't know of any case in which a tag might be used that contained all
>>three subtags but in which the country distinction generally matters
>>more than the script distinction.
--
David Singer
Apple Computer/QuickTime
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