Solving the UTF-8 problem; was Language Tag Modification 1694acad;

Stephane Bortzmeyer bortzmeyer at nic.fr
Tue Jul 3 09:11:46 CEST 2007


On Mon, Jul 02, 2007 at 10:43:39PM -0700,
 Doug Ewell <dewell at roadrunner.com> wrote 
 a message of 74 lines which said:

> Can we pursue this official version/unofficial version strategy, as
> an alternative to loading up the Registry with excise?

It seems a good strategy, very "better to light a candle than to
complain about obscurity".

I would say -1 to any decision of having *several* official versions
(because it would be more work for IANA and more opportunity to have a
discrepancy, something which is not serious with unofficial versions,
but could be dramatic between official versions).

But allow me a little troll: if we choose UTF-8, what about
normalization?

1) Do not mention it (this would mean that IANA would be free to
suddenly canonicalize the registry, thus making it different in a
byte-to-byte comparison)

2) Mandate NFC or NFD (which means an automatic registry checker would
have to check it)



More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list