LANGUAGE SUBTAG MODIFICATION - GB

Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com
Wed Apr 19 15:38:59 CEST 2006


> From: Debbie Garside [mailto:md at ictmarketing.co.uk]


> > (BTW, one school of thought says that if you divide an entity
> > then *all* the new entities require new IDs. In other words,
> > "GB" should continue to encompass the islands -- otherwise
> > you end up with an unknown and not-readily-identifiable
> > number of documents/records that are suddenly incorrectly
> > tagged -- and a new ID should be used for the entity GB - (GG
> > + JE + IM). But obviously ISO 3166 isn't managed with that
> > level of rigour.)
> 
> In general, I am of this school of thought, in particular wrt 639-6.
> However, I am not sure Her Majesties Govt. would be very happy with me if
> I
> proposed this. The added comment will at least inform users as to when the
> change occurred

I thought about this a little more this morning, and I realized this is the heart of the issue: with the addition of IDs for the islands, is GB still considered to include the islands, or does it explicitly exclude them? E.g. would an existing Jerriais doc tagged fr-GB still be correctly, albeit sub-optimally, tagged, or is it now incorrectly tagged?


If GB is considered to still include the islands, then no comment is needed. (The registry already indicates when the new entries were added; we don't need to document that with a comment on GB.) But if GB is considered to exclude the islands, then its denotation has been affected and we should document that with a comment on GB as Debbie has proposed.



Peter Constable


More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list