ISO 639-2 decision: "mis"

Peter Constable petercon at microsoft.com
Fri Jun 15 03:11:08 CEST 2007


+1 to what Doug said. The name has changed; the intended semantic has not.

I think we'd all agree it's not a good idea for anybody to use 'mis' in the context of 4646bis. But I don't see why we need to do more than recommend against its use except as a last resort: if an informed user feels that it's really what they need to do because they believe they know the language of their content and believe there is no subtag for it in the LSTR and feel they need to declare that condition, that should be their prerogative.

I would make some minor changes to the current text: from

"The 'mis' (Miscellaneous) primary language subtag is derived from a collective code and is used to identify linguistic content whose language is known but cannot otherwise be identified. It is commonly used when the range of language tags is constrained or for languages not otherwise categorized... "

To

"The 'mis' (Uncoded languages) primary language subtag is used to declare that linguistic content is in a known language but that this language cannot be indicated. It is typically used when the range of language tags supported in a given application context is constrained or for languages not otherwise categorized... "

(I particular think we should avoid "commonly used": we don't want to suggest to the reader that it is commonly used.

Peter


-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Doug Ewell
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2007 2:13 PM
To: ietf-languages at iana.org
Subject: Re: ISO 639-2 decision: "mis"

Kent Karlsson <kent dot karlsson14 at comhem dot se> wrote:

> I agree with Mark here.
>
> With this change, the use recommendation effectively hasn't changed, but
> the coverage has, and it has changed in a way to make it inherently
> unstable.

I agree with Peter here.  The intent of this code element has not changed,
but the new name reflects the intent much better than the old name did.  The
code element was always inherently unstable.

> I see two ways of dealing with this:
>
> 1) Ignore the change, and let the coverage still be "all languages" (one a
> a time).

Strongly, strongly opposed.

> 2) Deprecate 'mis', and use 'und' ("all languages (or not a language)") in
> its place (despite the different intention).

3) Deprecate "mis", and use "und" to mean "the language of this content is
undetermined" as it has always meant.

4) Don't deprecate "mis", and use "und" to mean "the language of this
content is undetermined" as it has always meant.

Please stop trying to postulate a relationship between "mis" and "und" that
isn't there.  They have always meant two totally different things.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Fullerton, California, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages

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