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

[Doug Ewell]

CE Whitehead <cewcathar at hotmail dot com> wrote:

> Possibly alas frx would be confusing after all given the existence of 
> a regional subtag FX??
>
> Type: region
> Subtag: FX
> Description: Metropolitan France
> Added: 2005-10-16
> Preferred-Value: FR
> Deprecated: 1997-07-14
>
> But this is sort of ahead of ourselves.

We can't worry about collisions or near-collisions between different 
types of subtags.  They are sharing a small, restricted coding space --  
short alphabetic codes often derived from pronounceable words -- and 
some similarities are inevitable.

Especially we should not worry too much about deprecated subtags like 
FX, which don't always make the best examples.  FX exists as a subtag 
only because it was briefly (1993-1997) available in ISO 3166 and there 
was a chance that someone might have used it conformantly in a language 
tag.

There are also some false friends, pairs of subtags that seem as though 
they might be related but aren't.  "be-BE" is Belarusian as used in 
Belgium, "et-ET" is Estonian as used in Ethiopia, "sl-SL" is Slovenian 
as used in Sierra Leone.  There's a good chance that somebody, somewhere 
will misuse one of these, but there's nothing that can (or should be) 
done about them.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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