Language tags, the phillips draft, and procedures

Doug Ewell dewell at adelphia.net
Mon Jan 10 07:09:23 CET 2005


JFC (Jefsey) Morfin <jefsey at jefsey dot com> wrote:

> This debate extensively uses English for usage examples. That language
> (and its particulars, or lacks of) is fully covered: I never saw an
> example of usage problem in Greek, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Bambara,
> Afar, French of Montfermeil, of the Cannebière or of Bercy, etc. in
> this debate.

We have certainly talked about Chinese, at least.  The tags "zh-Hans"
and "zh-Hant" (registered under RFC 3066, generative under RFC 3066bis)
have been used repeatedly as examples just in the past week, along with
"zh-Hans-CN" and "zh-Hant-CN" and similar for region
subtags -HK, -MO, -SG, and -TW.  They provide an excellent use case.

I have been "guilty" of using English for some of my examples, in tags
such as "en-US-x-texas".  That particular tag was meant to illustrate a
regional variation below the country level that might be worthy of
tagging.  I am fully aware that such differences exist for languages
other than English; I suppose I could have contrasted "it-IT-x-roma" and
"it-IT-x-milano" instead.  I'm not confident in my ability to craft
similarly plausible French examples, but I imagine "fr-FR-x-paris" and
"fr-FR-x-lyon" might work too.

I don't think any of this proves or disproves our ability to understand
language tagging issues.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California
 http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/




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