Request for variant subtag fr 16th-c 17th-c

[Mark Davis]

> FTR, I *still* think that allowing generative subtags was a mistake from
the start (made in ISO 646, adopted by RFC 1766, for which I am solidly to
blame)

I think you sell yourself short. An assessment of whether a feature was a
success really depends on whether the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. And
by that account, your choice of a generative mechanism has been a great
success; there are very few problems with it in practice, and it has proved
to be an extremely valuable tool in the identification of language in
software.

> And I thought the purpose of 4646 was to update 3066 to give a sensible
handling of the script tags.

That was one purpose, and a valuable one. But only one of many major
improvements. To repeat from
http://www.inter-locale.com/ID/why-rfc3066bis.html :

RFC 3066bis addresses a number of issues that implementers of language tags
have faced in recent years:

   - Stability of the underlying ISO standards
   - Accessibility of the underlying ISO standards for implementers
   - Ambiguity of the tags defined by these ISO standards
   - Difficulty with registrations and their acceptance
   - Identification of script where necessary
   - Extensibility


Mark

On 12/13/06, Harald Alvestrand <harald at alvestrand.no> wrote:
>
>
>
> --On 13. desember 2006 09:56 -0800 Mark Davis <mark.davis at icu-project.org>
> wrote:
>
> > The main point I was trying to make is that with generative tags people
> > can form combinations that (a) are meaningful, and (b) don't require
> > registration. That is the whole purpose of RFC4646. We explicitly don't
> > weed out the empty combinations like en-Cyrl-AQ, because as long as the
> > meaning of the subtags is well-defined, it is interchangeable.
>
> And I thought the purpose of 4646 was to update 3066 to give a sensible
> handling of the script tags. I guess I missed something.
>
> FTR, I *still* think that allowing generative subtags was a mistake from
> the start (made in ISO 646, adopted by RFC 1766, for which I am solidly to
> blame), and that generative script subtags was a mistake squared. The
> suppress-script scheme is a means of undoing some of the damage from
> generative subtags.
>
> I'd hate to go for the mistake cubed.
>
> [BTW, another set of generative subtags should be a policy matter, not a
> registration matter. Take it to the ltru list.]
>
>          harald
>
>
>
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